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Unisphere for PowerMax offers big-button navigation and streamlined operations to simplify and reduce the time required to manage a data center. Unisphere simplifies storage management under a common framework, incorporating Performance Analyzer which previously required a separate interface. As Unisphere is backward compatible, depending on the platform you can use Unisphere to:
The Unisphere Installation Guide details the environment and system requirements; however, a few points are noteworthy.
The Unisphere for PowerMax 10.0 dashboard is shown in Figure 72.
In addition, with the Performance monitoring option, Unisphere provides tools for performing analysis and historical trending of array performance data. You can use the performance option to:
The performance integration is seen in Figure 73.
The Performance option offers various screens - Charts, Analyze, Reports - which help users collect and analyze data. The analyze screen for instance, seen in Figure 74, can be used to convert the raw data from performance monitoring into useful graphs to help diagnose issues, view historical data, or even watch real-time activity.
Finally, the settings screen in Figure 75 provides the user the ability to modify the metrics that are collected, run traces and reports, and setup thresholds and alerts.
Unisphere can be run on a number of different kinds of open systems hosts, physical or virtual. Unisphere is also available as a virtual appliance for vSphere prior to version 10.0. Whether a full install, or a virtual appliance, Unisphere maintains the requirement for direct access to array management LUNs known as Gatekeepers. A minimum of six Gatekeepers (six Gatekeepers per array) needs to be presented to the virtual appliance as physical RDMs to allow for management and control of a storage array.
As an alternative to installing Unisphere on a separate host configured by the user, Unisphere is available in a virtual appliance format through version 9.2. The Unisphere for PowerMax virtual appliance (henceforth known as the Unisphere Virtual Appliance or Unisphere vApp) is simple and easy to manage, preconfigured, centralized, and can be configured to be highly available. The Unisphere Virtual Appliance is a virtual machine that provides all the basic components required to manage a PowerMax environment.
Note: There is no Unisphere for PowerMax virtual appliance for version 10.0. It is deprecated. Unisphere for PowerMax must be deployed on a physical or virtual host.
The latest virtual appliance for Unisphere for PowerMax 9.2 includes:
In addition, the Unisphere vApp also includes a browser-based configuration tool, called the Solutions Enabler Virtual Appliance Configuration Manager shown in Figure 76 shows the interface for eManagement. This web interface offers the following configuration tasks not available in SMC or from the virtual appliance directly:
Readers should consult the Dell Unisphere for PowerMax installation guide available on https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us for detailed description of the virtual appliance.
The Unisphere virtual appliance simplifies and accelerates the process to deploy Unisphere quickly and securely in an enterprise environment.
Unisphere for PowerMax offers integration with VMware that provides access to the storage administrator to view vCenters, ESXi hosts, VMs, and the storage presented to those environments. In addition, beginning with version 10.1.0, the administrator can provision RDMs directly to VMs. This can be extremely helpful, for example, when the VMware administrator configures Solutions Enabler and requires RDMs to the local array. Navigation within Unisphere is available from the home dashboard as a separate menu on the left-hand side in Figure 77.
When a vCenter is added to Unisphere, Unisphere will only add ESXi hosts in that vCenter that have storage presented from the array. This can be very useful if multiple clusters are in a single vCenter, each which sees different storage. The same holds true when individually adding an ESXi host.
Unisphere will fail the add if the host does not see the array storage and generate the error in Figure 78.
Figure 78. Unisphere for PowerMax fails to add ESXi/vCenter host
Figure 79 show the process to register a vCenter host. Unisphere requires that the user either imports a root CA certificate in step 2 (recommended) or imports a self-signed or end-entity certificate in step 3. Once registered, Unisphere will gather all the information about the environment.
In Figure 80 the newly added vCenter is listed, along with the hosts that comprise it. Since all hosts in this vCenter have storage presented from the PowerMax array, four are added.
Drilling-down into an ESXi host there are four tabs: Details (general info about ESXi host), Masking Views (pathing details), Virtual Machines (all VMs and details), and Performance. These views are seen in Figure 81. Within each view is the ability to drill further down into the environment.
Unisphere for PowerMax also supports VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols). An individual VM drill-down will reveal the details behind the vVols as in Figure 82. Note that the field VVOL WWN is only available prior to Unisphere 10.1.0.