Arxview FAQ
Commonly asked questions about Arxview DCAE:
If your question is not answered here, feel free to contact us.
| General Information |
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| What is the Arxview Data center analysis engine? |
| The Arxview Data Center Analytics Engine is a passive, agentless application that provides unique storage usage metrics on demand while reducing and simplifying the workload of the technical IT staff. |
| Arxview brings cutting edge visibility to your storage infrastructure. Users have unprecedented visibility into a full array of performance monitoring, capacity metrics and resource utilization visualizations, saving operators valuable time and resources and guaranteeing a balanced and fully optimized storage environment. Arxview's lightweight, web-based user interface brings a rich feature set to the forefront that can easily be viewed and shared throughout the organization. Detail on a broad group of performance factors, coupled with this flexible interface, delivers a uniquely valuable perspective. |
| Arxview presents views of your environment in many different ways, including nested trees, charts, treemaps, tables, and dynamic topology views. These views serve as windows into your organization, showing the nested storage hierarchy as well as the logical or business units that depend on those assets. The mapped objects include disks, luns, qtrees, volumes, aggregates, filers, arrays, blade chassis, virtual machines, virtual data centers, regions, and data centers, among others. Arxview adds logical units (business groups, applications, projects, teams, etc) to the mix, allowing you to see at a glance how your company’s IT dependencies traverse your entire storage network. |
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Arxview also monitors live performance and event data from a large variety of storage products and vendors, collecting them all under one pane of glass. Alerts, both system generated and user created, propagate up through Arxview’s logical and physical hierarchies, providing you with an immediate notification of not only the source of the problem, but also the scope. These alerts can be forwarded to third-party systems monitoring applications, closing the gap in total system responsiveness. |
| Who uses Arxview? |
| Arxview provides valuable information to anyone that manages, maintains or relies on computer data storage (servers, SAN arrays, NAS filers, etc). This includes business users, technical managers, system administrators, storage administrators, VM administrators, NOC personnel and enterprise IT architects. |
| What are the benefits to using Arxview? |
| Arxview users see immediate, significant and continued efficiencies in storage management and monitoring. tuning and planning. Many of the tasks and requests, from daily performance monitoring to key planning decisions, take minutes opposed to hours or days and are much more accurate, encompassing and easier to use than manual efforts or other storage software products. |
| Installation |
| How does Arxview ship? |
| The Arxview package is distributed on a standard DVD disc. It is also available as an electronic download. |
| What type of platform does Arxview run on? |
| The Arxview virtual machine is distributed in formats compatible with VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Oracle Xen/VirtualBox. |
| How does Arxview install? |
| Because of the system-native nature of the Arxview distribution it installs easily in the virtual environment of your choice (currently VMware or Hyper-V). It is a simple process of importing the Arxview virtual machine image into your virtualization environment using platform-native management tools. |
| For ease of use, scalability and flexibility Arxscan recommends VMware. |
| Should Arxview be run on a dedicated resource? |
| The Arxview virtual machine (VM) can be one of many guest servers running on a physical virtual host. However, Arxscan does not recommend running additional services or applications directly on the Arxview server. It has been highly tuned to perform tasks specific to its designed function. |
| How long does the installation take? |
| Importing and loading the Arxview image into a virtual environment takes less than thirty minutes. Subsequent setup and configuration of the Arxview application will typically take less than an hour. |
| What resources (RAM, disk and CPU) does the Arxview virtual machine require? |
| Arxscan recommends 2GB RAM, 35GB disk (100GB+ for larger enterprises) and two CPUs. |
| What if I don’t have VMware? |
| Several VMware server and workstation products are available free of charge. An Arxscan representative will be glad to assist you in selecting the best platform for the environment. |
| Discovery |
| How is the discovery performed? |
| The Arxview service connects to all major brands of storage hardware, as well as general systems of record (see #3 below), to generate a comprehensive, detailed map of your storage environment. All discovery steps are explained in detail in the accompanying documentation. With proper preparation an Arxview discovery can be completed in a matter of minutes. Be assured that the Arxview discovery service cannot modify the configurations or settings of any monitored equipment in any way. |
| What information should I collect ahead of time? |
| An easy to follow Deployment Checklist is included with every Arxview distribution listing each piece of information you should have handy in preparation for the Arxview installation. Generally speaking, some or all of the following information may be required depending on the environment: |
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| What systems of record does the discovery service connect to? |
| The Arxview service connects to storage assets via either system APIs or over the network. It also performs hostname lookups against the local domain name server (DNS). |
| What level access do I give the Arxview services? |
| For storage arrays and filers Arxview requires administrator-level access. Typically an account is created specifically for Arxview’s use. This allows for targeted auditing and troubleshooting while preventing unintended disruptions of the Arxview services in the event of a password change on a shared account. |
| For servers (SAN hosts, DAS servers, and virtual machines) Arxview requires local administrator access. |
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All credentials are encrypted and are not human-readable at any time. |
| How much network traffic does Arxview generate? |
| Arxview’s bandwidth impact is negligible; in fact it is usually difficult to ascertain. |
| What is the performance impact on the scanned equipment? |
| Arxscan has run a number of benchmarking tests in a variety of environments. These tests have demonstrated that Arxview does not measurably impact the performance of the target systems. |
| Can Arxview alter system configurations or otherwise disrupt service? |
| No. Arxview’s services do not tax the systems they monitor. In addition, Arxview code does not contain any instructions that could alter system configurations in any way. |
| What files systems are supported? |
| All common, current filesystems are supported, including ext2, ext3, CIFS, FAT32, NFS, NTFS and ZFS. |
| What operating systems are supported? |
| Arxview supports most modern operating systems, including all versions of Windows and all major distributions of Unix and Linux. |
| What types of devices are supported? |
| Arxview supports the most widely used storage arrays, including platforms from 3Par, Dell EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor IPStor, HP, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Pillar, Promise and Sun/Oracle. Arxview also supports any file server, SAN host or virtual machine running standard Linux-, UNIX- or Windows-based operating systems, and all current versions of VMware. |
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Monitoring Overview