Feedback requested for Virtual Storage Console 2.0 Users

[robertim]

We're looking for feedback from  customers that have downloaded Virtual Storage Console and are using it. Any and all comments and feedback welcome.

[amritad]

Hi Marcus,

This is what we have currently. We will try and make it more granular.

Regards

Amrita

[aholstnetapp]

Hello,

we had a long discussion about the VSC and the problem that our user groups with limited rights could see too much and also do to much with scheduled backup tasks.

The role informations on https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb59040  do not solve the problem.

The problem is:

- We use the VMWare roles to hide everything from the users that does not belong to them e.g. they could only see VMs where they are owner off but not the others.

Now with VSC the user can see backup tasks, can see time schedules and of course which VMs are also on the system.

This alone is not good, but the possibility to edit the scheduled time, suspend or even delete the backup tasks are too risky because we don't get the information that a task was deleted.

The possibility to manipulate the backup tasks exits not only for users with some rights, even users with read-only rights could do this.

So we made the decission for now not to use the VSC for production enviroment and go back to the standalone SMVI.

Regards

Alexander

[astueveneo]

VSC 2.0 seems to work ok, but the integration with the filer is not complete.  I admit, I am an edge case, since I am connecting to storage via a vFiler using multistore and not the root filer like most people probably are.

Where the VSC seems to be incomplete has to do with ISCSI.

Looking at NFS and iSCSI provisioned to the ESX servers is good, plenty of details about the storage (space, volume, dedup, etc).  However!  I don't see any integration with the Filer that I am used to seeing with Snapmanager products (particularly SM-E).  ie. With Snapmanager for Exchange, I am able to create iscsi luns and assign to the server.  All the VSC seems to be able to do, is give me the data about previously created luns.

[chriskranz]

I'm not sure if this has already been said, I haven't read all the posts. I also posted these comments in another VSC 2 thread.

1)     Allow us to add filers manually.

2)     Fix mbralign! Doesn't seem to be too reliable with the latest EHU and VSC

[fishmannn]

I wholeheartedly agree with the ability to add/manage filers manually! This client relies almost entirely on wizards and canned discoveries. We are new to NetApp storage and trying to setup VSC and document how we will use it.

Like the filers you need to have intelligent interfaces as options to GUI's. In this case give me the ability to modify a config file to put in the proper devices? We cannot even add both of our 3170 controllers because the system sees a NAS device through vCenter and won't let go of that IP.

[gary_kuyat]

We are having a number of problems with SMVI (the Virtual Storage Console tab), we have opened a case with NetApp, but as yet no progress.

1> When opening VSC, we regularly see IE pop up a dialog saying "Stop running this script?"  "A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly.  If it continues to run, your computer might become unresponsive."

2> Discovery seems broken.  Two of our filers discover LUNs and Datastores fine.  One discovers a few LUNs, but cannot figure out the Datastore mapping and one finds no LUNs.  All of this is working fine on the VMware side.

3> Documentation says that NFS mounts that are snapmirror destinations (mounted read-only) can cause problems.  We use this, so I was wondering what the impact would be.

As many have said, VSC needs to have an integrated repository.  At this point it has a more unified interface, but it feels very much like three products in close formation.  Authorization on the filers needs to be much easier.

[#8]

We have this same problem:

When opening VSC, we regularly see IE pop up a dialog saying "Stop running this script?"  "A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly.  If it continues to run, your computer might become unresponsive."

But it occurs when trying to "View Details" of our ESX hosts within the Overview page.

[#9]

For the stop running the script IE pop-up, please see. Microsoft KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175500

[chao]

I hope it could provide a choice. keep existing SMVI or use combined VSC framework.  my customer don't want to change more once time.

[darren_hedges]

Just looking at the backups using vsc 2 now and have a slight issue.

When we select a datastore for backup it does not let us deselect an individual vm so that it is not included in the backup.

What I wanted to do was backup the entire datastore except 1 vm and do a seperate backup of that vm.  Is this possible / going to be possible ?

[amritad]

You can exclude only datastores from a backup job if a VM spans across multiple datastores.

You could create different backup jobs – so you could select all VM’s from the datastores that you want and create a backup job for that and create another job for the VM that you want to exclude.

Regards

Amrita

[darren_hedges]

Your suggestion is not what i'm after though.

I do not want a specific vm to be backed up even though it is in the same datastore as others.  I would prefer to do that one separately as I need to stop various database services and restart them again after the backup has been done and would prefer to have that as a separate job so it's easier to see / work with when it fails.

So basically 2 backup jobs, 1 for everything in datastore except one specific vm and 1 for just the one specific vm but nothing else.

I don't particularly want to put it in it's own datastore but i'm guessing I may need to.

[HendersonD]

I just started using VSC 2.0.1 and have one suggestion. While setting up a Backup job the list of entities in my Datastore appear in the list on the left and ones I have chosen to included in my backup job appear on the right. Neither of these lists appear in alphabetical order. If you have a lot of VMs, having them in alpha order in both lists would be nice.

[paultctan]

Hi, I am having trouble getting NetApp VSC 2.0.1 to discover a FAS3140 Storage Controllers in the Overview page with the right management e0M IP Address instead of it's 10GbE interface IP on the filers as this 10GbE Network for NFS is now no routable and is no longer accessible from the VSC server.  Initially, the e0M interface was not available(not plugged into a network switch yet) so VSC 2.0.1 was discovering the two Storage Controllers of my FAS3140 found the 10GbE interface IP(temporary route was enabled to enable VSC to be setup) on the filer used for mounting NFS Datastores.  I've tried modifying Management IP Address filed for each datastore listed in vsc.xml and but VSC still discovers the FAS3140 with it's 10GbE IPs.  I've followed the following NetApp NOW knowledge base articles kb60378 - "VSC 2.0 does not discover all the ESX servers or storage controllers" posted 15-Sep-2010 and kb58968 - "Virtual Storage Console (VSC) uses different controller IP address than desired" posted 8-Jul-2010 but got no resolution to my issue. As I now have VMs running on NFS Datastores mounted on the 10GbE interfaces of my FAS3140 filers, I am not able to disable/remove IPs via ifconfig to ensure that VSC does not get IP Address it cannot reach.  Does VSC discover filers by checking if the it can access the FilerView (options httpd.admin.access) page and will setting options httpd.admin.access if=e0M restrict VSC to only discover my FAS3140 filers with the Management IPs assigned to my e0M interfaces on my filers?

[radnorsan]

I came across this while looking for a solution to a problem I've been seeing.

We are running vSphere 4.1 with VSC 2.0.1.  All VMs are on NFS.

Previously, I ran a separate instance of SMVI I had few problems.  Occasionally I would get a "partially successful" backup and one or two VMs would fail to quiesce the VM... Not a big deal...

Recently, moved to VSC 2.0.1 and while I have to say, while I do like the integration, I am seeing the same and additional problems with the backups.  Most notably, I started getting "backup failed" email reports.  When I check vCenter I find the backup task, in the "recent tasks" pane, is stuck, usually at 85% and most of my VMs still have a snapshot.  The first time this happened I didn't realize this fact and I had a dozen or so VMs each with snapshots for almost a week.

I'll likely be opening a call with NetApp but I figured I'd post this here too.

EDIT:

Oh, and just to make mention, the backup task you see in the "task pane" in vCenter will stay there at 85% until I restart the vCenter Server service.  I can restart the SMVI and vSphere plugin framework all day and get nothing until I restart vCenter Server service.

EDIT #2:

Here is a pic of what I see in the vSphere client.  For some background, this backup job is only a NetApp snapshot, meaning no VMware guest quiescing done here.  I got an email stating the successful completion of the backup job one minute later at 8:01 AM, and I can see the snapshot in System Manager and when I go to "Restore", yet this message will not go away until I restart the VMware vCenter Server service.

[raimiansch]

We use SVC 2.0.1 with VMware vCenter Server 4.1.0. Our VMware infrastructure is running on NFS.

The integration of SMVI to VMware vCenter Server is a gread idea. And the product works almost very fine. But I have some troubles and also requests for this products.

My problemes are:
1. We have within one volume always two datastores. With the CLI it is possible to make backups. But it is not possible with the GUI (vCenter plugin). I have opened a call for this but the support works very slow on this case.
2. The URL in the backup status mail is not correct. The URL looks like https://[fe80:0:0:0:0:5efe:a50:244%12]:8043/smvi/logViewer?id=backup_TIER3-T02_NSC-TIER2-09_20110101192501. When I replace the strange domain ([fe80:0:0:0:0:5efe:a50:244%12]) with the server name where svc is installed, it works.

some requests:
a. All lists of servers, datastores or datacenters within the wizards (backup, restore) are NOT sorted. So it is not easy to find the right item.
b. It would be fine, when the esx server lists are grouped to DRS Clusters and datacenters like in the vCenter Server.

Have anyone else issues like this?

Thanks
Rainer

[ancr]

raimiansch wrote

2. The URL in the backup status mail is not correct. The URL looks like https://[fe80:0:0:0:0:5efe:a50:244%12]:8043/smvi/logViewer?id=backup_TIER3-T02_NSC-TIER2-09_20110101192501. When I replace the strange domain ([fe80:0:0:0:0:5efe:a50:244%12]) with the server name where svc is installed, it works.

Anyone got a solution to this ?

I have the same problem in similar environment (SVC 2.0.1 with (virtual) VMware vCenter Server 4.1.0 on Windows 2008 R2 std)

Regards

André

.

[imarcroft]

there is a fix for this search for a proble where links look like ip v6 links

[stefan_pietsch]

We just wanted to start using Virtual Storage Console and downloaded and installed version 2.0.1.

Since the VSC installation our vSphere Clients hang after several minutes and we have to terminate them with the taskmanager.

When we deactivate the VSC plugin everything's ok again.

So to us the VSC is unusable and we'll go on using stand alone SMVI at least until this problem has been solved.

We are running vCenter Server and Client 4.1.0 Build 258902 and 4 vSphere 4.1.0 Servers Build 320092.

Kind regards,

Stefan

[amritad]

Hi

Do you see any error message during install? And where are you installing the VSC 2.0.1 on the vCenter or a different VM?

Regards

Amrita

[stefan_pietsch]

There was no error message during the installation.

We installed it on our vCenter Server (Windows Server 2008 R2).

Kind regards,

Stefan