End to End Mapping in Action
Virtual environments can be convenient and cost effective, but diagnosing and troubleshooting problems or performance issues can be challenging. In virtualized environments, servers and storage locations can become obscured as the locations are frequently moved. Storage Manager provides end-to-end mapping so you can gain visibility into where your storage and servers are located and track their performance over time. From any virtualization console in Storage Manager, you can click through to see the mappings from all formatted drives through the switch and into the LUNs on the array. Storage Manager also provides a single mapping report across the entire enterprise.
Advantages of End-to-End Mapping
- Gain visibility into where your storage is located.
- Help diagnose performance issues.
- Keep compliant by tracking the locations of critical or security sensitive storage.
End-to-End Mapping Abstract
Below is an abstract mapping from the virtual machine (VM) to the LUN.
End-to-End Mapping in Storage Manager
Below is an image of a logical mapping view of a VMware ESX. I accessed this logical mapping view by going from one of my virtualization consoles to the Storage tab and clicking Logical Mapping. From this view, I can map data stores to LUNs, track the number of VMs, and drill down to each LUN.
From this view, I can see the datastore, drill down to the VMs, or jump to the array and LUN and drill down further to the RAID group so I can check the LUN performance.
In addition to the logical mapping view, Storage Manager offers a physical mapping view where I can glean information about the health and status of the switch ports associated with my VM to LUN mapping.
See the GeekSpeak blog post, Oh Storage Where Art Thou?, for additional guidance on using Storage Manager to diagnose and resolve storage issues in your virtual environment.
