HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform Administrator Guide (5697-0934, May 2011)

Table 5 Troubleshooting Perfmon
Corrective actionProblem
• Check that the correct username and password are used for the VSM
server.
• Check that the time period is correct. For example, you may have
chosen 6 days instead of 6 hours.
Perfmon log does not start or is not working
Ensure that Apply is selected. Sometimes just clicking OK prevents the
settings from being applied.
Cannot change Perfmon settings
• Perfmon does not record data during VSM server downtime.
• If the VSM server software is reinstalled or updated, some VSM specific
counters may become corrupt. Delete those counters and add them
again.
Microsoft Excel will not open the file, or
there are empty cells in the file
• Making the column wider should show the full time.
• Highlight the column and have Excel format the data in a different
form. For example, HH:MM:SS can be more useful.
Excel just shows MM:SS in the column where
the full time should be displayed
Monitoring access to the VSM setup volume
This section describes how to monitor the working conditions of a VSM with regards to its capabilities
to access the disks which hold the setup volume and its mirrored copies. Slow access to setup
volume can have severe consequences on the system operational state and the following describes
how to identify such conditions and suggests ways to resolve it.
Description of the VSM setup volume
The VSM uses a database setup file that maintains the virtualized configuration that it creates. The
database setup file resides on a setup volume. The setup volume is synchronously mirrored to three
(and up to five) dedicated storage pools.
The setup volume is mounted on the active VSM server and the VSM agent on that computer is
responsible for keeping all the copies synchronized. Access to the setup volume is more critical in
database updates because the agent can declare a successful completion only after updating all
copies. Read implementation is much simpler because the agent only needs to read from one of
the mirrored copies because they are all identical (under normal conditions). In practice, reading
from the database rarely ends up in disk access because the database is mapped into the computer
memory.
Using Performance Monitor to review setup volume access times
Access to the VSM setup volume can be monitored with the Windows Performance Monitor tool.
On a VSM server, the Performance Monitor includes an additional dedicated performance object
that the VSM agent adds during VSM software installation.
To launch Performance Monitor, click Start > Programs > Administrative tools > Performance (or
Start > Run > Perfmon > Enter). The Performance Monitor window opens with a default display of
three monitored objects (Pages/sec, Avg. Disk Queue Length and % Processor time). They can be
removed by using the Delete key or clicking the delete icon (X).
Add the dedicated performance objects of the VSM agent. Click the '+' icon (or use Ctrl+I) to
launch the Add counters interface. On the Performance object drop-down list, locate 'Sync. Mirror
Group Performance' and 'Sync. Mirror Job Performance'. Each performance object includes multiple
counters and together they show the total and the specific performance for each synchronous mirror
group and jobs that run on the VSM server.
The following image is an example for the Performance Monitor interface when adding the
Sync.Mirror Group performance object.
52 Monitoring the SVSP domain