Prepare to get deep into storage.
In the past few weeks I had the pleasure of getting deep into a customer’s performance problem. Ultimately we identified some interesting issues in the environment that we traced back to an overloaded array. Like most performance problems, the complaints started at the application layer and then shifted to vSphere. Like many configurations, it was difficult to pinpoint why the storage was slow. But EMC account teams pride themselves in customer responsiveness. We assembled a small team to help out. I was amazed and grateful that experts from our midtier specialists in Australia, Malaysia, and India all pitched in on the analysis!
If you are a VMware administrator you may choose to leave the nuts and bolts of storage management to your storage teams. While this article talks about those nuts and bolts, I ask you to read on. A little knowledge about how your array works will make you an awesome VMware administrator. It will help you work with your storage administrators to get the most out of your array. When your array is at its best, so are your virtual machines.
The analysis you below is the product of tools EMC can run against your EMC storage in a very short time. The data collection took 24 hours in this case. But the figures I will show were auto-assembled in minutes. This is one of the many cool things an EMC technical consultant or one of our partners can do for you.
