With the advent and dynamically sized disks, I'd like to see an option to assign a custom size to volumes to allow for this 'thin' provisioned storage without having to use VMan to look at the datastores themselves.
The way I see this working would be:
- You create a virtual machine, to which you attach a volume which has a maximum size of 150GB. Rather than assign it all in one go, you 'thin' provision it, allowing it to grow as required up to the maximum size.
- You add the server to Orion, and once added, edit the volume details and check a box called 'custom size'. This overrides the value returned via SNMP/WMI and instructs Orion to do all threshold calculations based on the value entered.
I've seen a number of instances recently where volumes are always reporting 100% usage, due to them being dynamic, which makes monitoring these in the traditional sense pointless. A sea of red volumes is no good for NOC views (yes, you could filter them out with custom properties, but there is no value in even monitoring them at present).
We already have a mechanic in NPM which allows for custom values to override the information returned via SNMP, with the custom bandwidth settings on interfaces, so hopefully this wouldn't be a Herculean task to code in.
