The VNX Unified Storage platform is very flexible storage
platform. However, there are many moving
parts to the VNX. There may be times
that due to changes in the business, that you need to make changes to the
configuration of the array. It is a good
practice to follow to have a documented trail of what the configuration of the
frame was before you start the activity as well as what you have done after you
completed the activity. Though
Unisphere, data gather has been simplified, but there are times that the GUI is
not an option. There are use cases when
data gathering must be done via command line, such as Java issues, network port
blocking, or a slow connection which would make the GUIs unreasonable to
operate.
First off, you will need to log into the control station as ‘nasadmin’
or equivalent user account. To run the
script to gather data about the File in a “collect_support_material,” you just
need to run a single command.
/nas/tools/collect_support_materials
No parameters are needed for simple execution of the built-in
script.
This script will run for a few minutes, depending on how
much configuration you have done to your VNX. This is non-disruptive and causes
minimal impact to your environment since most of the commands are ran against
the control station; not the data movers or luns.
The result is a zip file that has all of the file
configuration output. It resides on the
control station still, so you will want to copy the file down to your local workstation. This can be done easily with WinSCP, FileZilla,
or some other SCP file transferring tool.
The file location will be displayed at the bottom of the
script. In newer versions of the VNX
File code, it is located in /var/tmp/, but previous versions of DART placed it
in /nas/var/emcsupport/.
Regardless, the
on-screen output will display where the Support Materials file is located and
its filename.
Once you have the file, it is a standard zip file that you
can extract the data from. Looking into
the file, you will see a directory named “cmd_outputs” which will contain all
of the commands on the VNX File’s output listed here.
For Example, if you wish to see the file systems on this
nas, you can look in the “nas_fs –list” file. If you would like to see how much
space you have left in your storage pools, you can look in “nas_pool –size”.
There is also a block collect that you can get called a
SPCollect. Again, there are numerous
ways to get this report, but keeping the theme of CLI commands, I will show you
how to collect it from the Control Station.
Simply run the command /nas/tools/.get_spcollect
This will run out and gather the SPCollects from the Service
Processors themselves and zip them up into a single file that will contain both
SPA and SPB, called SPCOLLECT.zip. This
file will also be stored on the VNX Control Station, which you can then SCP
down to your local workstation.
Lastly, we are able to gather up the VNX File Support
Materials and Block SPCollects in a single step.
Run /nas/tools/collect_support_materials –getsp and during
the collection process, the script will also execute the SPCollects and add
them to the zip file. Obviously, this
will take a bit longer, depending on how long it will take your SPs to do their
own collects. However, this single file
will have all of your VNXs configuration data.
You can then use this file to document the status of the array at that
time, plan your migration, or document the work you already did on the VNX.