VOM 3.0 Frequently Asked Questions

Transcription

1 General VOM 3.0 Frequently Asked Questions What is Veritas Operations Manager (VOM)? VOM is a comprehensive business solution for monitoring, operating, and reporting on data center environments using Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server. It combines the power of its predecessors namely Storage Foundation Manager, VCS Management Console, VCS Java Console and Veritas Enterprise Administrator into a single powerful solution. Where is the VOM User Guide? All VOM user documentation is online and accessed by clicking the 'Help' link at the top right from within the VOM interface. Does VOM 3.0 need anything installed on the Managed Host (MH) to work with Storage Foundation (SF) 5.x? Yes. Every version of SF that VOM manages requires the same VRTSsfmh package to be installed. However, this package is bundled with SF 5.1 installation. Does VOM interfere with Storage Foundation's functionality? No. Does VOM require the Veritas Enterprise Administrator (VEA)? VEA is only required on the Managed Host (MH) to support SNMP traps, running administration commands like create volume, and for Windows and HP-UX 3.5 discovery. VOM does not require VEA on the MH, but those features will not be available. How frequently is Managed Host (MH) information updated to the VOM Central Management Server (CMS) Database? The discovery on each MH is broken down into families to focus on a particular functional area that VOM discovers information about. Family Frequency (minutes) Information Discovered HOST 1440 Basic host details about the operating system, licenses, packages, and networking. It is assumed that most information relating to this family does not change very frequently.

2 SF 30* All aspects of Volume Manager, File Systems, and related storage network information. VCS 60* VCS and its related information. DB 15 Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, and Sybase databases and their storage dependencies. NR 5 Configuration status and external faults. NATIVE 360 3rd Party Volume Management information. *SF and VCS families are also event driven, so discovery is triggered when configuration change events occur. Because of this information should be update into the VOM central database in near real time. With the exception of a small heartbeat communication occurring every 10 minutes, no additional data is sent across to the CMS unless changes to the configuration are detected. Please refer to the VOM Administrators Guide for more information on VOM MH Discovery. Does VOM display localized (i.e. Japanese or Chinese) File System mount points? Yes. The standard encoding VOM uses is UTF-8. Any other encoding that is used requires that the xprtld daemon on the managed host be run under the locale/encoding that the mount point names were created. English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and all UTF-8 locales are generally supported. Does VOM support other non-symantec Volume Managers and File Systems? Yes. VOM will discover Logical Volume Manager (LVM) information on Linux, HP- UX, and AIX Managed Hosts, as well as ZFS information on Solaris. VOM provides discovery of this information only, no administrative options are currently available. For Windows, it discovers both Basic and Dynamic Volumes. VOM also supports discovery of VxFS as well as many other native file systems including EXT3, ReiserFS, HFS, UFS, JFS, JFS2, NTFS, and ZFS. Does VOM support other non-symantec Multipathing Solutions? Yes. Besides support for Veritas DMP, VOM also supports discovery of EMC PowerPath, Microsoft MPIO, and HP Native multipathing. However, the DMP Management Add-on only supports Veritas DMP. Does VOM support other Clustering Solutions? Yes. VOM also supports discovery of Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS). What Veritas Cluster Server Management Console (VCSMC) functionality is missing in VOM 3.0?

3 Site concept: replaced by Business Entity concept but lacks scoped operations like migrate site and recover site. Tagging: Region, Line of Business, Department HA Fire Drill (previously called Virtual Fire Drill) DR Fire Drill Readiness views Migrate site workflow (Migrate cluster is available) Recover site workflow DR Alert and coordinated action to recover Simulator Support Configuration Analysis Report Successful Failover Report Dropped Features (not targeted for future releases) o Attribute reports for Clusters/groups/resources info present in general VOM views o Failure Summary info present in Uptime Analysis Report o Fault Trending info present in Uptime Analysis Report o Group Activity info present in Resource Activity Report o Agent Inventory/ Agent Usage not used much o Heartbeat report not used much Can I adjust the session inactivity timeout? Yes, this can be adjusted by editing the session-timeout value in the web.xml file: Unix CMS: /opt/vrtssfmcs/esmweb/webgui/sm/web-inf/lib/web.xml Windows CMS: %PROGRAMFILES%\Veritas\VRTSsfmcs\esmweb\webgui\sm\WEB- INF\lib\web.xml 1) Update the following entry: <session-config> <session-timeout>30</session-timeout> //here value is in minutes </session-config> 2) Then restart the webserver using: Unix CMS: /opt/vrtssfmcs/cweb/sfmw restart Windows CMS: sc stop SFMGUI sc start SFMGUI It is not recommended to set a large timeout as that could increase the memory utilization on the CMS. If many people are logging onto VOM simultaneously and not explicitly logging off it could cause out of memory errors to occur.

4 Installation How much space is required for the VOM Central Management Server (CMS) database? By default, the VOM installation puts the database in /var on the CMS. It is a good idea to change this to its own partition or volume. If possible, it is recommended that this be put on a striped mirror for performance. The recommended size depends on the amount of resources that will be managed. On an environment with more than 1000 hosts, it is advisable to have around 10 Gigabytes available. How much space is required for a VOM Managed Host (MH)? 1 Gigabyte should be more than enough no matter how big the host is. I am running Storage Foundation Manager (SFM) or Veritas Cluster Server Management Console (VCSMC). How can I upgrade? Upgrade to VOM 3.0 is only supported from SFM 2.x. Users of VCSMC or SFM 1.x will need to start with a fresh install of VOM. Can a VOM 3.0 Managed Host (MH) be managed by a SFM 2.x Central Management Server (CMS) as well as by a VOM 3.0 CMS? No. A VOM 3.0 MH requires a VOM 3.0 CMS and above. Can Veritas Cluster Server Management Console (VCSMC) and VOM co exist? Yes. They can both be installed on the same server. If I update will I lose all the historical information in Veritas Cluster Server Management Console (VCSMC)? Yes. Since there is no explicit upgrade from VCSMC to VOM, no historical information would be shown in VOM. However, because VCSMC and VOM can co-exist you can still use VCSMC for any historical data. Is VOM backward compatible with SFM 2.x MH? Yes. Discovery will still work. However, new VOM 3.0 features and details will not be seen for these MHes. Why does VOM give me the option to set the Central Management Server (CMS) hostname during configuration?

5 VOM will suggest the CMS hostname and IP address on the configuration page. Customers are required to verify this hostname/ip is accessible from all intended managed hosts. Is Central Management Server (CMS) HA supported for Windows CMS? No, this is not supported at this time. Networking What protocol is used for VOM 3.0? VOM uses a HTTPS based protocol. Essentially, it uses web services as the underlying message exchange format. What are the networking requirements? What firewall ports need to be opened? All communication between Managed Hosts (MH) and the VOM Central Management Server (CMS) goes through port tcp/5634. If you have a firewall in your environment this port needs to be opened (bi-directional). For the user interface, you need to open port between the client desktop (where the web browser runs) and the CMS. NO other port is required. The CMS's hostname needs to be resolvable from the MH. It is recommended that DNS be used for this. If the hostname is not resolvable, you can specify a valid IP address, however this may impact the usability of the product as the IP is what will be displayed for the Host name in the VOM Web Console. What kind of network traffic can be expected if VOM is deployed? Managed Hosts (MH) send an HTTP request (a.k.a. ping) to the Central Management Server (CMS) indicating that it is alive every 10 minutes. This request is a very simple request with less than 1 Kilobyte of payload (max). When there is a change detected on the MH, the MH sends a HTTP POST to the CMS indicating the change. However, only differences (diffs) are sent. So, in a static (not changing environment) there is no traffic other than the 10 min pings from each managed host. When there is a change, the payload size depends on the amount of change which is never more than a full (initial) discovery of that host. On MHes with 15,000 LUNs and a 2,000 File Systems and Volumes the full discovery payload can be as large as a few Megabytes. What kind of SNMP support is there in VOM? There is limited SNMP trap support in VOM. It does require that VEA be installed and running on the Managed Host because it is the source of events that are sent to SNMP

6 server. VOM ships with an SNMP MIB as part of the Central Management Server package. You can select the specific events to be forwarded. Please look at the rule manager under the "Monitor" tab, and refer to the VOM documentation for more details. Virtual Machines Can VOM manage Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) running in a VMware virtual machine? Yes. Since in most cases VMware does not expose the HBA directly to the guests, VOM would not be able to discover the Array Port of any LUNs nor the HBA ports. However, VOM will still give you the Enclosure information for any raw device mapped LUNs. Non-RDM disks are plain old SCSI disks since they are abstracted from the guest. Can the VOM Central Management Server (CMS) be installed on a virtual machine? Yes, all it requires is an Operating System that is in the list supported by VOM 3.0 CMS. If using VMware, please note that VOM requires a 64 bit Operating System for Linux and Windows. The VOM CMS can also be installed in its own Zone or LDOM. Add-ons What is a VOM Add-on? VOM Add-ons allow the extension of the base functionality included in VOM. Please refer to for more information about available Add-ons. Do Add-ons install anything on the Managed Host (MH)? It depends on the Add-on. There are Add-ons that install purely on the CMS. However, there are also add-ons like that install pieces on both MH and CMS. The installation of the MH components is done automatically as part of the add-on install. The user does not have to do anything special to the MH for this. Since older versions of Storage Foundation Manager (SFM) add-ons are not compatible with VOM, is there an upgrade for these add-ons for VOM 3.0 available? Storage Foundation Administration for Unix: New version will be available for download

7 Storage Foundation Administration for Windows: New version will be available for download Storage Reclamation and SF Product Version Reports: These are now included in the base VOM product Volume Migration: This will be replaced with Storage Template and Volume Migration which will be available for download. Security What privilege or account do you need on Managed Host (MH)? For adding a host into a domain, you need to know the root user and password of the MH. Once a host is added a secure channel is setup between the CMS and the MH using PKI/PKCS mechanisms. After the host is added to the domain, the password for the root user can be changed and it does not affect the operation of VOM. Does xprtld allow for PAM, Active Directory, or LDAP based authentication? This is allowed for xprtld running on the Central Management Server (CMS). For the Managed Host, VOM allows native OS authentication for end users. What is a Security Group? Security Groups provide a simple authorization mechanism to users of VOM. A security group associates the authentication group and the authentication domain with a predefined role. For the Admin role, you can associate Business Entities with the security group to limit the authorized scope of a particular user. What should be specified in the name of a security group? This should be the name of the security group that you want to create. Make sure that the name of the authentication group and the name that you specify for the security group are the same. Authentication group can be an OS group, LDAP/Authentication Domain group, or PAM/NIS group. How are privileges given on a cluster (Cluster administrator/operators) from VOM? The cluster admin/operator roles are mapped to admin/operator roles on the business entity for a cluster group type in VOM. Please see the VOM documentation for more details.

8 Administer Link for Host Operations Why do I see the Administer link on the Host detail page as RED instead of GREEN even after I add a managed host successfully to the VOM Central Management Server (CMS)? After the host is added to the CMS successfully the discovery process takes a minimum of 5 minutes to update the database with the discovered details of the added host. As there is some time lag between addition of the host and discovery completion, the admin link will show up as RED until the discovery has completed. Please try refreshing the page after 5 minutes, and you should be able to see the admin link as GREEN. How do I perform operations on Storage Foundation (SF) objects such as Disk Groups or Volumes? Click on Administer link in the details page of the Host where the SF objects are located. This will take you to the summary page of the objects that can be managed. Click on any object category in that page and select the desired object. Infrastructure Is xprtld a web server? Yes. It is a modified embedded web server based on the popular open source shttpd that listens on port It only does authenticated SSL. It also has a built-in role based authorization mechanism. Anything with the URL containing "admin" can only be accessed by the root user or an OS account with admin privilege. All scripts within agent directory under /opt/vrtssfmh/web/agent can be accessed from other managed hosts as "root". These scripts are hardened and use Perl with Taint mode turned on. Why does VOM use a separate web server for the web console when xprtld is also a web server? The xprtld web server is a stripped down version of web server which can only handle http request. We use apache tomcat for the web console as it provides the necessary servlet containers for the java based web application to function. What is xprtlc? Xprtlc also known as Xprtl Client is a CLI interface that s communicates with xprtld.

9 What is fault.pl? There are several aspects of the system that VOM monitors as part of VRTSsfmh package that is installed on the Managed Host (MH). However, this is obviously not all encompassing. Users of VOM can choose to add their own discovery and exception detection scripts to augment our offering. Fault.pl allows you to indicate if a host is faulted or at-risk and it will show up as such in the VOM dashboard. A simple http server monitoring script that runs off of cron can just call fault.pl if it stops running and clear it when it starts running again. Please refer to the VOM documentation for more details. What is xdist? xdist is a powerful command that allows you to push a script to managed hosts in the VOM domain and execute them. Typical use cases could include provisioning a server, updating a patch on multiple machines, or detecting compliance related anomalies in your environment. This command can only be executed as root on the central management server and it will execute commands as root on the target systems. It is quite secure and arbitrary commands cannot be called unless you bypass it using your own scripts. It utilizes a white listing mechanism for authorized commands similar to how sudo operates. Please refer to the VOM documentation for more details. What is xinfo? xinfo allows you the options to get information about the state of the VOM infrastructure. Please refer to the VOM documentation for more details. What is xclusinfo? xclusinfo interfaces with the VOM database and extracts information pertaining to the clusters and their associated objects that are discovered in the data center. Can I access the VOM Central Database directly? No. This is not supported at this time. Reporting What reports does VOM offer? VOM offers reports in five different categories: Storage Utilization: reports on storage allocation, file system usage and resource mapping.

10 Storage Reclamation: reports to help uncover configured but unused storage infrastructure, such as underutilized LUNs, file systems, LUNs not part of a disk group or LUNs that are connected to multiple hosts. Trend/Activity: reports that focus on cluster related data such as uptime analysis, service group and resource activity as well as resource fault trending. Environment: reports that provide an overview of the product usage and versions deployed as well as underutilized licenses. Virtual IP usage displays all the virtual ip addresses configured under VCS. Inventory: reports that provide an overview of the status of different SF/HA components deployed and configured in the environment, such as clustered hosts not monitored by VCS, disks with single or no path. All reports can be scheduled to run across the entire domain managed by VOM or per Business Entity. Is VOM able to create comparisons/differentials between reports? VOM doesn t have a specific feature for this, but data from the different reports can be exported for further analysis. Performance Statistics What performance related data is tracked by VOM? For Hosts, VOM tracks available memory and average CPU load. For Disks, Volumes, File Systems and FC Initiators it monitors read and write statistics. Where are performance statistics stored? This data is not stored in the Central Management Server (CMS) Database but on the Managed Host (MH) at /var/opt/vrtssfmh/stats/. If the VOM CMS is not running, VOM will continue to collect historic performance statistics on each MH. Are performance graphs supported on Windows Managed Hosts? No, this is not supported at this time.

11 Patches Is VOM able to proactively show which SF/HA patches are required by a specific host? VOM offers integration with Veritas Operations Services (VOS) from Symantec, from where it retrieves the latest information about hotfixes, point patches, and release patches on a per-server basis. This provides a system administrator an efficient way to manage patches so server environments are up-to-date. My network does not allow for direct internet access. Can I still access the Veritas Operations Services (VOS) functionality? Yes. The VOM Central Management Server has support for using a proxy server to connect. Using VOM, can I deploy any type of patches including Veritas Storage Foundation patches? Currently the package/patch functionality is used only for VOM specific updates and not for general purpose usage. Troubleshooting Information Central Management Server (CMS) Configuration/Setup URL: hostname>:5634/ Web Console URL: hostname>:14161/ Ports required to be opened: TCP 5634 TCP VOM Processes running on CMS For Unix/Linux: /opt/vrtssfmcs/asa11/bin64s/../bin64/dbsrv11 /opt/vrtssfmh/bin/xprtld /opt/vrtssfmcs/esmweb/jre/bin/java /opt/vrtssfmcs/sec/bin/sfmsecd Commands to start/stop VOM processes on CMS on Unix/Linux: xprtld: /opt/vrtssfmh/adm/xprtldctrl <start stop> Web console: /opt/vrtssfmcs/cweb/sfmw <start stop restart >

12 Database: /opt/vrtssfmcs/config/adm/vxsfmcsdb <start stop stop_force> Authentication: /opt/vrtssfmcs/sec/bin/sfmsecdctrl <start stop> VOM services running on CMS For windows: Veritas Operations Manager Authentication Service Veritas Operations Manager Service Veritas Storage Foundation Messaging Service SQL Anywhere - SFM3_<hostname> CMS Log File Locations: Unix/Linux: General: /var/opt/vrtssfmcs/logs CMS database installation/upgrade script: /var/vrtssfmcs/config_db CMS/HA installation script: /var/vrtssfmcs/sfmha_dir Unix/Linux installer log file: /tmp DB engine: /var/vrtssfmcs/sfmdb3.dblog Windows: General: %AllUsersAppData%\Symantec\VRTSsfmcs\logs CMS database installation/upgrade script: %AllUsersAppData%\Symantec\VRTSsfmcs\config_db Unix/Linux installer log file: %TEMP% Managed Host (MH) Port required to be opened: TCP 5634 VOM processes running on MH: /opt/vrtssfmh/bin/xprtld /opt/vrtssfmh/bin/sfmh-discovery.pl /opt/vrtssfmh/bin/vxdclid Commands to start/stop VOM processes on Unix/Linux MH: xprtld: /opt/vrtssfmh/adm/xprtldctrl <start stop> sfmh-discovery: /opt/vrtssfmh/adm/vxvmdiscovery-ctrl.sh <start stop> vxdclid: /opt/vrtssfmh/etc/vxdcli.sh <start stop restart> VOM services running on windows MH: Veritas Storage Foundation Messaging Service MH Log Files: Unix/Linux: /var/opt/vrtssfmh/logs Windows: %AllUsersAppData%\Symantec\VRTSsfmh\logs