Adding DS400 into Director 5.1

[Bastch]

Trying to get IBM Director 5.1 to add a DS400, according to online docs Director 5.1 supports DS300 and dS400 devices.

But keep getting same message "CIM Error"

Call logged with IBM but IBM not the fastest in coming back with Director or DS400 issues

Thanx

 

[Jemimus]

Hi Bastch,

We recently implimented a clustering solution with 2 DS400 units, and I have had the same problem. The prefered solution seems to be that whole "ServerRAID management station" deal, whih exists totally seperately from IBM Director infrastructure.

Seems a great shame there are no more out of the box integration options for this, and next to no documentation about this aspect of the storage management story.

The best I have been able to find about it is in the DS300/400 Best Practices Redbook:

--------------------
Note: Display groups are not available when a boot from a IBM ServeRAID
Manager Support CD is performed or when the IBM ServeRAID Manager is
used as IBM Director plug-in. IBM Director 5.10 may be able to support
management of DS300 and DS400 controller
--------------------

As for the problem itself, I found the following text, from the same redbook, interesting:

--------------------
An agent can only be managed by one Management Station. Before a agent can be managed from an other Management Station, the agent must be removed from the original Management Station. See 4.7.5, “Remove an agent
from a Management Station” on page 104 for the details of removing a agent from a Management Station.
--------------------

By "Agent" they mean an DS400 unit.
Now I know the DS400 has a lot of these integrated licensing things on board. So the above 'association' between an agent and a management station, may well be a license thing, and the reason why we cant directly connect to the unit using SMI-S.

I 'Assume' that the "agent" talks to the management station using the SMI-S language, but I am not sure. If that is the case, there is no technical reason why we couldn't connect IBM Director to a unit directly. But have you noticed how limited the inbedded version of ServeRAID manager in IBM Director console is? You cant add external management stations to it.. but you can add them in the seperate ServerRAID console installation, the one that comes with seperate servers and also with the DS400 itself.

In short.. the whole thing reeks of licencing limitations, and most likely very little attention was given to integrate both solutions elegantly. Also bear in mind that the middle-tier and datacenter-tier of Totalstorage solutions have their own management software... not a word is mentioned about IBM director infra.

A seperate thing you could do for now, is to configure IBM Director to accept SNMP traps from the Management Station software. That would allow at least some rudimentary integration.

And the Management Station software can also mail you, by the way

 

[Jemimus]

Bumpage for great justice!

IBM has released a complete and comprehensive technote on how to manage DS400 with IBM Director, check out out here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/WP100802

I will follow this and let you know the results