Brief product description
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize integrates all products that use IBM Spectrum Virtualize software into the BVQ infrastructure end-to-end monitoring. From a hardware point of view, these are the products around the IBM SAN Volume Controller SVC, IBM Storwize and IBM Flash System. In the BVQ end-to-end infrastructure, these products can be monitored with the system health map, end-to-end monitoring, reporting and analysis are also available. With the integration into the end-to-end infrastructure of BVQ, questions can be clarified, like for example: How reliably does the storage work? Are there any risks? Are there problems caused by any VMware VMs or any PowerVM LPAR? How does the storage behave in the SAN? Are there any SAN bottlenecks that affect storage operations?
BVQ for IBM Spectrum virtualize is part of the BVQ overall product. A more detailed description of BVQ can be found here:
BVQ Base Product and BVQ spec sheet
Content
Supported IBM Spectrum Virtualize products and licensing
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize supports SAN Volume Controller, Flash and Storwize products System type BVQ support Comment SAN Volume Controller (SVC, except SA2/SV2) any IBM Storwize V7000U yes IBM Storwize V3500 yes IBM Storwize V5000 Gen1 yes IBM Storwize V7000 Gen1 IBM FlashSystem V840 yes *1 Enclosured based pricing is available for customers who have used this form of licensing before BVQ Version 6.1.min. BVQ version Licensing
based onyes TiB any TiB *1
IBM Storwize V3700any TiB *1
IBM Storwize V5000 Gen2any TiB *1
V5010, V5020, V5030
IBM Storwize V7000 Gen2yes any TiB *1
IBM FlashSystem V9000any TiB *1 IBM FlashSystem FS840
IBM FlashSystem FS900yes any TiB *1 no performance stats gathered IBM FlashSystem FS91xx yes 5.5 TiB *1 IBM FlashSystem FS92xx yes 6.1.3 TiB *1 IBM Storwize V5000 Gen3 yes 5.7.2 TiB *1 V5010E, V5030E, V5100 SVC model SA2/SV2 yes 6.1.3 TiB IBM FlashSystem FS92xx yes 6.1.3 TiB *1
Spectrum Virtualize (SVC) & Storwize Code version BVQ support BVQ version Comment / Limits <7.6.0.0 not supported Out of IBM support (BVQ support on special request) 5.6.2 → current Versions which are not mentioned above are considered as 'not supported'. IBM FlashSystem FS840 / FS900 Code version BVQ support BVQ version Comment / Limits Tejas performance stats currently not gathered Versions which are not mentioned above are considered as 'not supported'. N/A 7.6.0.0 → 7.6.1.8 supported 4.0 → current Toleration support - Support of new V7.6 Feature: DRAID integrated in 4.1 7.7.0.0 → 7.7.0.5 supported 4.1.1 → current Toleration support - Support of new V7.7 Features: NPIV Hosts, IO throttling planned for H2 2020 7.7.1.1 → 7.7.1.9 supported 5.0.1 → current Toleration support - Support of new V7.7.1 Feature: Host groups planned for later release 7.8.0.0 → 7.8.0.2 supported 5.0.2 → current Toleration support - Support of new V7.8 Features: Cloud tiering planned for later release 7.8.1.0 → 7.8.1.12 supported 5.2.7 → current Toleration support - Support of new V7.8.1 Feature: Port congestion stats integrated in 5.5 8.1.0.0 → 8.1.0.2 supported 5.4 → current Toleration support - Support of new V8.1.0 Feature: Hot spare node planned for H2 2020 8.1.1.0 → 8.1.1.2 supported 5.4 → current Toleration support - Support of new V8.1.1 Feature: Thin-Provisioned MDisks planned for H2 2019 8.1.2.0 → 8.1.2.1 supported 5.5 → current Toleration support - Support of new V8.1.2 Feature: Data Reduction Pool integrated in 5.6.3 8.1.3.0 → 8.1.3.6 supported 5.5 → current Toleration support - Support of new V8.1.3 Feature: Deduplication integrated in 5.6.3 8.2.0.0 → 8.2.0.4 supported 5.5.3 → current Support for FS9100 & V7000, no new relevant Features in V8.2.0.0 8.2.1.0 → 8.2.1.11 supported Toleration support - Support of new V8.2.1 Features: NVMe + others planned for H2 2020 8.3.0.0 → 8.3.0.3 supported 5.7.1 → current Toleration support 8.3.1.0 → 8.3.1.3 supported 6.1.0 → current Toleration support 8.4.0.0 supported 6.2.6→ current Toleration support All other on request N/A
Please contact us in this case! We reserve the time to test new versions internally first.1.3.0.2 → 1.3.0.9 supported 4.0 → 5.4.0 1.4.0.7 → 1.4.0.10 supported 4.0 → 5.4.0 1.4.3.0 supported 4.0 → 5.4.0 1.4.4.0 → 1.4.6.1 supported 4.0 → 5.4.0 1.4.7.0 supported 5.4.1 → current 1.4.8.0 supported 5.4.1 → current 1.5.1.0 → 1.5.1.2 supported 5.4.1 → current 1.5.2.0 → 1.5.2.6 supported 5.4.1 → current 1.6.1.0 → 1.6.1.1 supported 5.4.1 → current All other on request N/A
Please contact us in this case! We reserve the right to test unknown versions internally first.
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize licensing
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize is licensed by capacity. We offer license packs of 10TiB. Please contact your SVA sales representative for pricing information.
Details here: License information
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize data collection
BVQ collects data from the IBM Spectrum Virtualize environment for visualization and analyzing purposes. The collected information consists of capacity, topology, performance and event data. BVQ scan the IBM Spectrum Virtualize environment by reading the already available performance data from the SVC nodes and retrieves topology information using the SVC CLI. The connection between BVQ & IBM Spectrum Virtualize is secured via HTTPS, so no data is sent without encryption. The collected data is stored in the authentication protected BVQ database.
Typical scan intervals for IBM Spectrum Virtualize platform are between 1 min and 5 min.
More base information about BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
We have a lot of valuable information in our BVQ Release Notes.
You will find more interesting detail information here.
BVQ features and functions
Typical BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize use cases
Finding answers to the following questions:
- How healthy is my storage? Do I have risks, do I exceed limit values?
- How does my storage interact with the infrastructure, are servers or networks overloaded and cause problems e.g. at application level?
- How strong is the current utilization, when does it have to be expanded?
- How is the load distribution? Can I improve utilization by redistributing?
- How available is my data? Are the data mirrors & remote connections working? Can I adhere to the specified RPO?
- How will the storage behave when more load is added?
- Are there any risks or optimization potential that I have overlooked?
End-to-end infrastructure use case
- Which VMs are using my storage?
- Which SAN ports are loaded by a special server IO?
- Is the communication between cluster node free of SAN blockage?
General BVQ Use cases
This high level of transparency improves the quality of the services while at the same time reducing costs. In very short time, BVQ provides a high level of information from which the administrator can derive measures for achieving higher operational safety .The factual knowledge gained with BVQ allows cost-optimized and verifiable planning and decisions on the further expansions.
The typical tasks that are performed with BVQ are:
- Automated System analysis with the BVQ Systems Health map
The only thing you have to de here is to activate the alerts of the BVQ Systems Health map.- Be alerted early if a problem occurs
- Identify the problem and plan a response using the included solution description
- Use the results from the Systems Health map to carry out a more in-depth system analysis with monitoring or the Expert GUI or request an analysis from SVA.
- Connect the results from the Systems Health map with a ticket system so that the problems are automatically and promptly passed on to the right people.
- Contact SVA for special alerts and tests or connections to external systems.
- Monitoring using the web monitoring tool
Use the dashboards supplied with the BVQ version, which you can easily adapt or expand.
- Use the delivered dashboards to carry out monitoring at different levels.
- Create new dashboards to enable special monitoring tasks.
- Set up dashboards for application or system managers, so that ongoing monitoring tasks can be carried out directly by those responsible.
- Contact SVA for special dashboards to be created.
- Reporting using the web reporting tool
Every platform comes with reports which can be run automatically or scheduled. New report types can be created with the BVQ Template Editor.- Reading out the results of automatically generated reports via a simple web address
- Generation of new reports based on existing reporting templates
- Create own new reporting templates to create new report types
- Setup schedulers to create automated reporting and seining results directly to system or application managers
- Contact SVA for assistance in creating a specific report template.
- Performing analysis
The BVQ Expert Analysis GUI comes with many analysis favorites which act like recipes to lead to very good results- Carry out planning analyzes based on measured facts and developments
- Conduct risk analyzes to identify problems early and avoid them
- With problem analysis through, you can quickly find the reasons for bottlenecks or misconduct.
- Be curious to understand the interrelationships between the systems and the systems themselves better and better to become an even more valuable administrator.
- Our system engineers at SVA will be happy to help you carry out analyzes.
- Connecting ITSM environments to BVQ to access live measured data
We already prepared base tables for every object type in BVQ which gives a quick start to retrieve the right data for your external applications like ITSM- Replace the existing interface types with a general BVQ interface in order to get from the many different languages for each individual system to a query language. This will significantly reduce the number of scripts and programming required.
- In many cases, replace complex calculations with many accesses with results access from BVQ. This reduces the complexity in the scripts and the susceptibility to errors.
- Integrate high-quality results from BVQ such as alerts or events directly into the systems.
- Connect BVQ with Splunk, Kibana, ServiceNow, Matrix42, Icinga, ...,
- Feel free to contact SVA for any type of ITSM connection or for ITSM project support.
Tools and definitions included in the scope of delivery
BVQ comes with many tools and pre-defined definitions so you can get started right after the installation. These tools include analysis favorites, monitoring dashboards, reports and prepared alert templates, and probes for the Systems Health map.
Solution packages included in BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- Accounting support for BVQ Spectrum Virtualize platform
- Copy Services Support for BVQ Spectrum Virtualize Platform
- SLM support for BVQ Spectrum Virtualize platform
- opt. Global Mirror Change Volume monitoring and analysis
Systems Health map support and alerting templates for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
System Alerts for the BVQ systems health map
In total, more than 250 alerts are available for the Systems Health map today. These alerts are fully defined and can still be adjusted using parameters in the Predefined alert section of the BVQ server
The Systems Health map for this platform includes alerts from the following areas:
- System limits
- Configuration
- License compliance
- Status
- Capacity
- Performance
- Transmission
Predefined alerts
Alerting templates to create detailed alerts
More detailed alerting can be set up via alerting templates or using the free definition of alerts.
The alerting templates are very easy to use and are filled out using dialogue system. With these templates you can tailor alerts in many ways to the current environment.
For more special and complex alerts use the advanced editor in the custom rules area of the BVQ Server. The SVA Service Team can support you with creating complex alerts.
Monitoring for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Monitoring dashboards are always updated and extended.
Starting with the Entry Edition, you can design your own dashboards or adapt the existing dashboards.
- Available dashboards
SVC - All clusters overview
This dashboard displays central metrics from SVC and Storwize nodes. It is recommended that this dashboard is used for all clusters of the complete installation.
SVC- Cluster performance overview
This dashboard provides an overview of a Storwize or SVC cluster
- SVC - MDisk detail ... — This dashboard displays performance metrics of several selected MDisk.
- SVC - Node detail .. — This dashboard displays central node metrics from SVC and Storwize nodes.
- SVC - VDisk detail ... — This dashboard displays tables and performance metrics of several selected MDisk groups and VDisks.
SVC - Cluster capacity overview
Displays the essential capacity information with additional information on the efficiency of SEV and compression.
- SVC - MDisk group capacity detail — Displays the essential capacity information with additional information on the efficiency of SEV and compression for several MDisk groups
SVC - VDisk to virtual machine
This dashboard provides an overview of the SVC VDisk performance and the related VMware Virtual machine performance on different levels
BVQ for IBM Spectrum Virtualize also provides in depth Global Mirror Change Volume (GMCV) monitoring and analysis
Reporting for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
Reports are always updated and extended.
Starting with the Entry Edition, you can design your own reports or adapt the existing reports.
- Available reports
SRS Performance report
This report is covering average IO rate (IO/s) aggregated by volumes or MDisks, grouped by SVC/Storwize system, pool or storage system.
Cluster capacity report
Capacity report covering current and historical allocatable, allocated, unallocated and virtual as well as licensed capacity (TiB) grouped by SVC Clusters and MDisk groups.
SRS capacity report
This report is covering current allocated and virtual capacity (GiB) grouped by SVC/Storwize system, pool or storage system.
Backend Storage Capacity Report
Capacity report for backend storage providing objects like SVC cluster, disk controller, disk type and disk array, reporting their current allocated and unallocated capacity (TiB) and their number of arrays and disks.
Accounting report
Accounting report covering current cost (€), real and virtual capacity (GiB) and 7d average IO rate (IO/s) grouped by the business organizational units: BVQ Cost center, Application group, Application and VDisk group.
Analytic favorites for IBM Spectrum Virtualize
The way how to use favorites and some of the major favorites are explained in more detail in the BVQ quick start guide.
The favorites tree consists of the areas.
- General Section: Topology and performance overview
- Analysis Section: Favorites used from experts for deeper analysis
- Table View Section: Tables for all objects. These can be used for reporting or the REST interface.
List of included analysis favorites
The analysis favorites are shown here as a list, the details of which can be opened if you are a customer and have access to the detailed BVQ documentation.
Otherwise the names of the analysis favorites are very meaningful and give a good impression of the possible applications.
- Folder: SVC
- Folder: Alerts & Events
- Folder: BVQ Alerts
- Folder: Events
- Folder: Analysis
- Folder: Performance
- Folder: Capacity
- Folder: Configuration
- Folder: Tiering
- Folder: HA & DR
- Folder: Provisioning
- Folder: SVC SAN analysis
- Folder: Table views
- Folder: Storage consumer
- Folder: Virtualization layer
- Folder: Storage provider Frontend
- Folder: Storage provider Backend
- Folder: Ports
- Folder: Copy services
- Folder: Localities