Mitrend For EMC XtremIO

Hi,

EMC SE’s and Partners have been using Mitrend for years now, in it’s essence, it’s an Pre-Assessment / analysis tool that allow EMC and non EMC customers to look at their existing dataset and analyze what array is needed if migrating from say netapp to a VNX or a VMAX, the ease of use is the key metric here, no one wants to use a tool that then require you the partner to do the anlysis yourself, you want to know what array you need, how many drives you need and how many engines. SIMPLE.

Today, we are pleases to announce the EMC XtremIO support for Mitrend for capacity assessment, the initial release will focus on capacity and future versions (they are rolling fast!) will focus on performance analysis.

how do you use the tool?

EASY!

 

1. in step one you log in to the portal, if you’re an EMC SE or a partner you shouldn’t have an issue, if you are a partner and still do not have an account, just speak to your EMC partner alliance manager and he / she will get you an account.

 

2. when you log in to the portal, you are faced with a simple workflow, the collection, submission and viewing the assessment

 

3. since this tool support many sort of assessments, you want to view the instructions for the XtremIO one

4. once you are there, you can email yourself the assessment tool or download it directly.

5. the tool can either run on a windows host (the exe file) or on a linux or vSphere host (the .bin file)

 

6. running the tool in a vSphere enviornment, you want to install the bin file on an esx that is mapped to the volumes (VMFS and / or RDM’s), and in order for you to tell the tool which volumes you want to scan, you first need to run the following command : “ esxcli storage vmfs extent list “

once you get the output of all the volume this ESXi host sees, you can then run the tool on all or the selected devices you want it to scan:

“ ./DataAnalyzer –X /dev/disk/<device_name>; “

 

7. the screenshot above shows you how the tool looks when it runs on a linux host (very similar to an ESXi host)

8. now it’s tike to create the assessment so we can generate reports based on it.

9. the last step is to upload the files, there’s pretty much every way there, simple upload, FTP, syncplicty (my favorite!) or even via dropbox.

10. that’s it!, after a while you will be emailed back with the report, the screenshot above and below show you some slides from the final report, awesome!

these reports are not relevant for vSphere, they are more relevant for file servers or even VDI VM’s!

below you can see the most important slides, the data reduction ones, already supporting deduplication and compression which are now part of EMC XtremIO

 

 

what’s coming next?

throttling and performance reports for XtremIO so you can actually know how many X-Bricks you will need not just from a capacity point of view but also performance.

so, what do you say, isn’t it a cool tool or not