No AS400 Agent

Question

Since there is no AS400 agent these have to be maintained manually. I have added the hosts as Generic, but can not find out how to add relationships. Is there a way to manually maintain other information beyond the basic host and WWN entries?

seth_silverman · Accepted Answer

There are a couple of places that StorageScope maintains the relationship between devices. Unfortunately, the manually created host container may not help in this situation unless you can add the real HBAs (as defined by their WWNs) to those manually created hosts and I'm not sure if that can be done (it is possible, I just don't know). If you can do that, you may be able to get the information you need through StorageScope reports.

Without that capability, the straight-forward approach would have ben to use the HostDevice to ArrayDevice relationship which requires a host agent to be run on the host, so unfortunately this approach is not possible here. The second approach involves using the Device Allocation table, which contain the SAN path information. Yes, I'm winging it a bit, but hopefully it will spur some thoughts.

Along those same lines (more winging it), if you can't associate the HBAs/WWNs to the manually created hosts, I wonder if you can create UDG containers for each AS/400 host that contains the WWNs for that host's HBAs. I think StorageScope will aggregate the capacity information by those UDGs and I think it takes into account Device Allocation and not just host to array device.

If you happen to use HBA aliases to help you infer the AS/400 host, you may also use filtering on Device Allocation in your queries.

Allen Ward · Answer

What relationship info are you looking for? Which version of CC are you running? And what kind of array are these hosts attached to? (I'm kind of assuming Symm, but there may be a way to connect an AS400 to a CLARiiON that I haven't heard about).

If you are connected to a Symm and are just looking for device allocated information you can always use the Masking view. This will show you the details of what is available to each host.

SDarden1 · Answer

Control Center 6.0Symmetrix DMX4Looking for Device relationship, masking, etc.So far we have had to use symcli to maintain the AS400's storage. I prefer the cli, but others in my company do not. We also need to get reports via StorageScope yet it is not seeing the relationship so each AS400 shows up at 0 assigned when we actually have over 15 ter assigned.Due to both of these items I have been instructed to get everything I can for AS400 added to ECC.

Allen Ward · Answer

I understand. I've got a whack of storage assigned to AS/400s as well.

For now I would recommend gathering the data semi-manually using the Masking view, but I would also suggest joining the ECN Control Center Online Community to provide feedback to the Devs on the need for this kind of functionality. If you aren't already a member:

www.controlcentercommunity.com

SDarden1 · Answer

Masking view does show all the devices for me, but how does one get StorageScope to update. Using the GUI vs CLI for management is minor in my mind, but need to get the storage reports.

No I am not a member of the ECN Control Center Online Community, but I will be.

BarryR1 · Answer

If you have data in your ECC tables that you need to get into StorageScope you simply run ETL (Utilities->Settings->ETL Scheduler, click "Run Now").

This will populate the DSS Tables.

Provided StorageScope reports on the data you will then be able to create reports using Query Builder and or the Built-in Reports.

Allen Ward · Answer

Thanks for the input Barry, but that doesn't really solve the root problem identified here.

I think the issue is that the info doesn't get populated into the RIGHT tables in the Repository.

One example of this is when you try to find the relationships from a manually created MO to a storage system. The data has to be there some where, because you can get it through the masking view, but you can't get the relationship directly. I think it has to do with masking view being based on the associated HBA ports, while relationships must be tracked by MO. Somehow that isn't getting carried over.

SDarden1 · Answer

Thanks Barry, but data is populating over to StorageScope, just not complete data.
Example: Report shows an unknown WWN with x LUNS assigned for a total of y GB. Add the manual entry (as400) into ECC. Now the report shows host-abc with x LUNS assigned for a total of 0 GB - size is lost on the reports.

I figured it has to do with relationship, but the LUN count is correct.

As a quick validation I am looking a the SRM Views and selecting the array.
No actual reports designed as yet, but if the SRM View doesn't see it correctly then I don't think a custom report would either.

Storage Resource Management (SRM Suite)

No AS400 Agent

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