Review: Onaro VM Insight 1.0

Onaro VM Insight 1.0

While most vendors have concentrated their development efforts on SRM (storage resource management) and SM (storage management) applications, Onaro took a completely different approach.

Since the beginning, Onaro focused the development of the SANscreen suite of applications not on providing new management tools but on automatically discovering and documenting the often complex links between applications and storage components.

Using SANscreen is like navigating your data center with a good GPS system that clearly identifies the paths between application servers and storage.

However, a clear vision of how things are connected in your data center is just one of the benefits of using SANscreen. Over time Onaro has developed a suite of applications that monitor capacity allocation, replicas and provisioning, in essence all services that are storage related.

In fact, using SANscreen you can create proper administrative procedures and make sure that they stay in place. For example, you can create a policy to mandate dual path access between a critical application and its database volume: If that policy is not enforced or is ever violated, the system will immediately raise a flag and automatically send warnings using messaging systems of your choice.

An indication of how successful Onaro has been is the number of customers who bought into that concept: The vendor claims that one out of three Fortune 50 companies has deployed SANscreen.

Another indication of that success is that mainstream vendors have, some of them admittedly, injected in their portfolio some of the functionality of SANscreen.

What’s new?

In December, Onaro announced VM Insight 1.0, a new addition to the SANscreen suite that aims to extend its features to VMware ESX servers and to guest virtual machines.

I took my first peek at VM Insight connecting remotely to a system that was already installed on Onaro premises.

The first and perhaps most obvious clue that I was running VM Insight was the ability to point at a VM and seeing the topology map of its s storage, which you could previously do only for physical servers.

Mapping the topology of a VM is cool and perhaps even more useful than it is for a physical server, but VM Insight has another neat feature for customers who deploy clusters of VMs,

You can define a policy dictating that all members of a cluster must have access to the same volumes, which will add another degree of reliability to the VMware environment that would be difficult to attain without VM Insight.

Once that policy is in place, any discrepancy, for example adding a new volume to only one of the members, will automatically create a new entry in the violations log.

If you have multiple VMware ESX servers in your care, deciding where to allocate new VMs is probably a recurring dilemma. Interacting with VMware Virtual Center and collecting performance statistics for each host, VM Insight makes that decision a no brainer.

To find the best candidate for a new VM, you can launch simple queries asking to rank each ESX server according to criteria such as I/O, memory or CPU usage: In response, SANscreen will list the eligible machines ordered according to those criteria.

It’s interesting to note that SANscreen collects also performance numbers for each VM and presents those results in tabular format. From those values you can easily create charts, by putting a check mark beside selected criteria. The application will automatically create separate graphs from your selection.

One aspect of charting I didn’t like: When selecting similar multiple metrics, such as asking to chart percentage of I/O, CPU and memory utilization, the system will automatically cram all three values on the same chart, which makes them difficult to read.

I hope that in the future users may have more flexibility on what values to chart and how, also because at the moment Onaro doesn’t offer a comprehensive set of reports, which could compensate for the confusing charts.

However, I know from having seen a beta version that future releases will have better reporting.

Onaro VM Insight 1.0

Availability: Shipping

Pricing: VM Insight starts at $75,000 for up to 10TB – $250/TB for additional managed capacity

Verdict:

This first version of Onaro VM Insight makes a convincing case of extending the benefits of SANscreen to virtual environments.

Even with the limited reporting capability and the somewhat inflexible charting mentioned before SANscreen with VM Insight 1.0 deserves to be considered by all but the least sophisticated VMware shops.

The suite comes at a price, but is a worthwhile complement for a VMware installation that helps not only to better monitor the use of storage from each VM but also facilitates managing each VMware server with more informed allocation of critical resources such as I/O, CPU and memory.