Follow The vSAN To ControlUp

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions continue to gain momentum, and vSAN by VMware is poised to be a significant player by the sheer fact that it’s the virtualization market leader’s foray into hyperconverged solutions.  At ControlUp we want to deliver the broadest coverage for your virtual infrastructure needs, which is why we decided to integrate vSAN into the ControlUp console.

How easy did we make it? Couldn’t be easier. Once you enable vSAN on your vSphere, ControlUp will automatically detect it and your vSAN cluster will show up in your VMware or Hypervisor folder in the organizational folder tree (left hand side of the ControlUp console). Once vSAN has been added to your ControlUp console, you will see a variety of real-time metadata and performance metrics in your storage view under different dimensions – datastores, datastores on hosts and virtual disks.

Under the Datastores view, you’ll see a general overview which displays the hosts, VM count, compression & deduplication, capacity state and disk configuration. This makes answering questions like “What VMs are facing high latency or slow IOPS?” easy. You can also see the capacity overview, and answer questions such as: “Is the outstanding I/O abnormal? Is the congestion high?” What’s more, in the Datastores view, you can utilize the smart navigation to check your vSAN Health and see a breakdown of the health checks, as the ControlUp console will show you an aggregated health check score, factoring in dozens of vSAN health scores to give you an overall picture of health.

When you’ll look at the Datastores on Hosts, it will show metrics related to the vSAN Disk Groups on the hosts, showing information regarding the cache and capacity tiers health, and enabling you to answer questions like: “Is my vSAN cache latency high?”, “Am I reading from cache?”, “Is the write buffer low?”. We’ve also equipped you with ready-made vSAN preset views, which you can choose from, such as the vSAN cluster network utilization overview. This preset will help you understand the vSAN network traffic health within the vSAN Cluster hosts. It will also help you answer questions like “Are there any dropped packets on my vSAN network?”.

ControlUp’s trademark fast troubleshooting applies here too. Double clicking drills down into the next level so that you could easily and quickly identify issues causing slow storage performance or high latency and find their root cause. So for example, if you spot an issue on the datastore level, double click to drill down into the datastores on hosts, then to the virtual disk, then to the specific logical disk on that VM, to see the process that is causing the issue. ControlUp will clearly show and allow you to drill down from the datastore all the way to the process level, which is not available with other solutions.

You can also use the built in alerts and notifications system – by setting up a trigger that will notify you every time your vSAN datastore has high write or read latency for over a certain period of time. This way you’re always in the know and can’t be blindsided by issues after they have boiled over and your users are complaining.

And of course, all this wealth of data will be carried over to ControlUp Insights, our historical reporting and analytics portal, so that you could analyze performance trends over time, investigate issues from last week or last month, and get a better understanding of your overall performance.

Like what you see? ControlUp 7.3 is now  in beta, Drop us a line if you would like to join!