Power Monitoring in ITA - ITA Icons

01/24/2008

Dave finished some testing on the 10G Blades, and I finally got some dedicated access to a PowerEdge M600 blade in our chassis. I've been wanting to look at some of the power monitoring capabilities. Here's a very preliminary look at some of the attributes you can measure. You need to have latest OMSA, I installed 5.3.1 on this blade.

I used a simple CPU load generator to ramp up the power. It's a single threaded app, so had to run a few instances of it. So weird to see eight CPUs show up in Task Manager for a blade! Who remembers some of the big honking floor standing servers with four CPUs that took up the space of a small fridge?

We are about to get our PowerEdge 2950 III. Todd has first dibs on it, but I'll get the OMSA agent installed and do some more power monitoring and report back those findings.

I also saw an interesting thread in the Dell Community Forums. A similar question I had when I started working with IT Assistant, and actually a question I still have about some parts of it. What do all the icons mean? Yes you can hover over some of them, and most of them make sense, but some are not so easy to interpret what they are trying to say to me. So I figured we could just do a wiki page on the IT Assitant Icons, and you could help me fill out the chart. I'll update this page with a link to it. I just got screen shots; now I need to pull out the icons and build the page.

Please help me with it. We can have the developers fix any of our misinterpretations.

Scott