Thursday, March 4, 2010

HP EVA fnames.conf

Our SAN environment has 120TB spread over 4 HP EVA's (3 8100's and a 4400). We've worked through numerous difficulties with these, not the least of which was the dreaded "Saturday morning slowness." Part of our efforts to combat this was to attempt to gain greater insight into where the IO was actually coming from - at the time, we simply didn't have the system in place to do this.

Our friends at HP provide EVAPerf, which kicks out CSV files with a deluge of data (200MB+ per day per array). In order to make sense of this, a good friend on the software engineering side was added as a resource: he did a great job of writing a loading program that took those CSV files and kicking them in SQL. Our company is looking into IP rights, it's that awesome.

Meanwhile, we discovered a few months ago that our CSV's were filled with WWN's, which are pretty cumbersome to work with. HP's solution is the friendly names file fnames.conf, which just allows the EVAPerf task on your server to replace the WWN's with readable, English names. So a fnames.conf file was set up to automatically recreate itself once a day.

Well, as time went on and we changed more and more, the data I was working with was increasingly filled with WWN's. Investigation Monday morning turned up this little gem:
"The fnames.conf file must reside in the directory in which HP Command View EVAPerf was installed. "

Well, whoever set this up had it creating the updated file in a c:\utilities subdirectory - we were working with a months-old fnames file, since EVAPerf was installed under c:\programs\hp... After updating this, we went from 15/150 correctly represented LUNS in one EVA's csv file to 135/150 LUNS showing up with real names, greatly simplifying our vdisk I/O statistics. Woot!

Extremely useful information on decoding EVAPerf data:
http://www.fcoe.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=46#addcomments

See here for more official info on the fnames/evaperf integration
http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00605846.pdf

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