Agentless ControlCentre

All indications I've seen are that the next full release version should include this functionality. Not sure what the target dates are for that, although the first product (Storage Configuration Advisor) in that family is already out (with Agentless features as requested).

Just be careful what you wish for... I know there are many environment (mine included) where agentless is not going to gain us much. Having to configure generic accounts on massive numbers of hosts would be more painful than deploying and maintaining the agents.

Thanks for the feedback Allan. The problem is we have over 200hosts (all O/S flavours) in our environment and the hosts are maintained outside of the storage team and to try and keep all the agents updated and running is a major nightmare.

We make extensive use of the StorageScope API to report on the various storage paltforms and capcities per host we have on-site and we are constanlty finding the data in the repository out-of-date due to the agents not running or not reporting correctly. I was informed that master and host agents are required for the reporting but so far nobody can confirm what information will be lost in the reporting if we drop all master and host agents?

We also have separate teams to manage the Server environments. Most of the guys on our Storage team used to be Server Support though and we have been able to make special arrangements with our Server Support folks to get admin access to the servers for the purposes of maintaining the agents (at least for the Windows hosts). You might want to look into that option (although it still requires a fair bit of hands on activity).

As for what information you will lose, the Host agent gathers all the data about the HBAs, and how the hosts use the storage allocated. With no host agents you can manually create objects and associate HBA ports with them to maintain some relationship information, but you will lose all the info regarding host allocation.

1.    How many storage admins are there in your team to manage this?

2.    Do you make use of StorageScope for your storage reporting? If not storagescope what other SRM products do you use?

3.    How do you differentiate/report on the different storage categories allocated to each host i.e.: Production storage, DR storage,FRA Storage, Clone Storage etc...?

4.    What functions do you use ControlCentre for...mapping,masking etc or do you do this all via CLI?