During the chat Kristoffer had a couple of questions around the MD3000i. One of which was how do you monitor the performance from a Linux system? I checked with a good Linux friend of mine and he recommends the sysstat package (or RPM) which includes iostat.

Anybody else have a recommendation?

Not sure, but I was looking for the same thing from a Windows standpoint. I even tried to discover our MD3000i from IT Assistant using snmp with no luck.

Are you doing another chat this week? (ie. tomorrow?)

On windows you can use Windows Performance Monitor - Perfmon.exe - to get lots of disk performance info. I like to look at read and writes per second as well as seconds per read and writes. Combine this with the disk latency and queue numbers and you can get a pretty good picture of performance of the disks.

There is a chat tomorrow - iSCSI Networking with featured guest Marc Farley! (but we can cover other stuff as well if needed)

Todd

Gotcha. Does that give me stats for the entire SAN? I have LUNs presented to a VMWare Host as well, so just trying to get an overall view of the SAN.

I'll jump in tomorrow and ask these questions!

Using perfmon will only get you stats on a host by host basis. The MD3000i does not have any GUI based array level monitoring tools. It is possible to use the command line - SMcli - for the MD3000i to pull some performance info at the array level and dump it into a CSV file. This would also work on Linux as well. SMcli is included with the PowerVault Modular Disk Storage Manager - the GUI tool that you use to manage the MD3000i. SMcli is in the MD Storage Manager\client directory.

I had never used it before your question prompted me to do some investigation - but I put together a quick command line sript that will dump a sample of performance info into a file:

C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>smcli -n r2md3000i -c "set session performanceMonitorInterval=5;set session performanceMonitorIterations=5;save storageArray performanceStats file=\"c:\\cliPerfStats.csv\";"

You would need to replace the -n parameter with the name of your MD3000i array. The complete documentation for the SMcli is located here - http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/md3000i/en/CLI/PDF/CLIMR.pdf

I'm going to work on putting up a new wiki page on this stuff in the next few days.

Todd

I found an error in the script that I posted above. You only use one set session command to set both the performanceMonitorInterval and the performanceMonitorIterations parameters. If you have the script like I do above, then the Interval is not set correctly and will take a sample every .5 seconds. The script should look like this to correctly set the interval and iterations:

C:\Program Files\Dell\MD Storage Manager\client>smcli -n r2md3000i -c "set session performanceMonitorInterval=5 performanceMonitorIterations=5;save storageArray performanceStats file=\"c:\\cliPerfStats.csv\";"

Todd

I put up a new page that focuses on how you can use the CLI to monitor the performance of the MD3000i. It is located here - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/MD3000i+Performance+Monitoring

Check it out and give your feedback!

Todd