Server View

ICON Manager's Server View is explicitly designed to help a system administrator provision and manage storage for applications on a Windows or Linux server. That makes the appearance of Server View-in particular its logical hierarchy of managed objects-totally unlike that of any other management GUI for a storage resource.

To enable a system administrator to create and modify storage volumes with a minimal number of steps from a single console, the Server View layout displays all servers that have a SAN fabric path to the Emprise 7000 storage system and all of the logical volumes assigned to those servers. Moreover, to support ongoing management processes, such as expanding volume capacity, creating point-in-time snapshots using copy-on-write, and making full block-level copies, Server View provides detailed logical volume attributes that include total capacity, used space, and free space. Thanks to Web Services, Server View provides all of the volume details normally associated with a local server disk management GUI.

To speed administration and reduce the possibility for errors when provisioning storage for servers, Server View provides a number of wizards that are typical of what can often be found within a server OS. Using Server View, the storage provisioning process begins with the choice of a server. That choice will dictate the launch of an OS-specific wizard. The Create Volume wizard guides the process from the creation of a logical volume on the Emprise 7000 system to the formatting and mounting of the logical volume on the target host server. What's more, the Server View wizard strictly enforces the use of a configuration template whenever a new logical volume is created.

Storage View

For storage administrators, who need to ensure that storage resources such as the Emprise 7000 system are optimally utilized, ICON Manager provides several role-based views including Storage View, Physical View, and Statistics View.

Storage View offers IT administrators a more traditional storage management layout, based on logical volumes. Within Storage View, an IT administrator can organize the screen layout by characteristics such as virtual volumes, volume mirrors, and server host initiators. In this way, Storage View provides storage administrators, who are accustomed to the GUIs of standard Fibre Channel storage arrays, a very intuitive environment for dealing with such advanced functionality as volume expansion, block copy, volume mirroring, and point-in-time snapshots.

Storage administrators can also drill down on logical volume properties to determine the layout details of a volume with respect to the ISE modules in the Emprise 7000 system. This is exceptionally important whenever it is necessary for IT to initiate configuration changes.

Having provisioned our servers, we switched to the storage-centric tasks of detailing storage resource usage via the Storage and Statistics Views. Through these views we were able to detail resource utilization in depth including storage on logical mirrors and RAID striping of ISEs. What's more, we were able to monitor and confirm the I/O throughput of a high-performance logical volume in a transaction processing test scenario.

Virtual View for VMware

The real fireworks begin when Virtual View is invoked under ICON Manager for a VMware ESX Server VOE. With ESX Server and vCenter Server both supporting Web Services as the interoperability method of choice, provisioning storage for VMs, which can take dozens of steps-including multiple storage rescans-is just as simple as configuring storage for a physical server.

With Virtual View, administrators have a unified view of their VMware Virtual Infrastructure, with which they can explore and map all VMware systems and storage relationships. There are analogs to all of the capabilities that ICON Manager provides to physical servers. Within Virtual View, resources can be displayed in either a VM-centric or a Datastore-centric manner. What's more, there are automated wizards to create, expand, or delete volumes for VMs-both as VMDKs and RDMs-as well as create, expand, or delete VMFS formatted Datastores.

Like their Server View wizard counterparts for provisioning storage on physical servers, the Virtual View wizards create end-to-end processes to provision volumes for ESX Servers and VMs. What makes the Virtual View wizards so valuable for IT is the fact that as a manual process, storage provisioning is far more complex than storage provisioning for a physical server.

In a VOE, storage provisioning for a VM first involves creating a logical volume for the ESX Server. That logical volume must either be encapsulated as a VMDK volume in a Datastore or mapped as an RDM volume with pointers in a Datastore. Then the ESX Server must pass the VMDK or RDM volume to the VM, which must mount, create and format its own logical disk. This process requires many more steps than a simple physical server and involves multiple storage device scans.

We created and expanded logical volumes for VMs as well as logical volumes as Datastores for a an ESX Server. In all cases, after setting a set of standard properties, the storage process ran correctly to completion in a fraction of the time needed when using a standard storage server.

Via ICON Manager's wizard, the inherent complexity of provisioning VMs is trivialized, while the templates that drive the process ensure perfect accuracy each and every time the process is invoked. By leveraging standard Web Services protocols, ICON Manager radically departs from the notion of just managing a class of devices to managing all of the devices involved in an end-to-end storage process. In so doing, ICON Manager shatters previous notions of single-pane-of-glass management.