Josh: Hello. Josh Stephens here, Head Geek at SolarWinds. Today we are here to talk about how to manage your datacenter with the new version of Orion. Managing datacenters is a complex task. Datacenter resources include networking resources, storage area network resources, computer resources, both physical and virtual. And managing that all together can be something that most management systems have a hard time with, but the new version of Orion does it very elegantly. Today I’m here keeping it real with my good friend and senior product manager Brandon Shopp. Brandon, thanks a lot for coming on the show, and tell us about the new features in Orion.
Brandon: Sounds good, Josh. So, first off we focused around virtualization. We added more depths around virtualization, specifically around monitoring from your vCenter, down through your clusters, your datacenters into the individual ESX hosts and down to the guests.
Josh: So, we roll all that up now within the UI, rap there within the lucid interface with Orion.
Brandon: Exactly. We have a dedicated view just specifically for virtualization.
Josh: That’s cool.
Brandon: Second off we added more depths specifically around fiber channel switches, and what I mean by that is the ability to view the WWN name for the ports, the CUs and the sensor details specific to that fiber channel. We also, within our lucid web interface added a dedicated VSANs summary view to allow you to view the specifics of the VSANs within the infrastructure, and the traffic throughput across those VSANs. And finally, we added some dedicated functionality around the Cisco Unified Computing Systems’ platform, and what that does is, it provides the ability to you to have a single unified view into that chassis, so it gives you a single unified view into the server, the fiber channel within the UCS, as well as the networking component within the UCS chassis within a single view.
Josh: That sounds fantastic. I mean, the Cisco UCS is a great technology.
Brandon: It is.
Josh: Love to see it managed within Orion. We can sit here and jibber jabber about this all day long, but folks probably want to see it by now. So, let’s go ahead now and give you a look, we'll do you a quick demo of the Orion network performance monitor, the latest version, and show you these key features in action.
Brandon: So, first we'll start up by looking at the network summary homepage. Within here you can quickly see the status of all the devices within your network infrastructure. And, the first one we are gong to look at today is the Cisco UCS, or Unified Computing System. Within here, you can see the specific device we have. So, the first thing you see here, besides the Average Response Time & Packet Loss, is a set of specialized views around the UCS chassis, for an overview of the fabric interconnects that are associated with that chassis, and the specific chassis within the UCS and the blades that are associated to those various chassis. Here you also see the specific to the fiber channel switch within here, the connectivity units and its status, as well as the VSANs that belong to this UCS chassis. Now, drilling into specific UCS chassis you can see the status of the fans, as well as the power supplies that are associated with these fans. Besides of the other specialized views we’ve added specific to the USC chassis, we are also subscribing to the UCS event bust to grab a specific USC events from the API stream directly into Orion, which then can be alerted on, reported on, using the Orion core infrastructure alerting and reporting services.
Another challenge when it comes to monitoring your data center is having complete visibility into your storage traffic within your network infrastructure. Within the network tab, we provided a virtual storage area network summary view, which gives you full visibility into the total VSAN traffic within your infrastructure, including by VSAN with the ability to drill down into specific fiber channel switches, as well as see the ports associated with that fiber channel switch. Now, within this view, you have dedicated detailed information, specific to that switch, such as connectivity unit statuses, and the other list of VSANs that are associated to this specific switch.
Another challenge many users have within monitoring your datacenters, specifically around virtualization, having the ability to poll their VMware infrastructure at the ESX, the host, the datacenter, and the cluster level, and within here, having the ability to view the status of those ESX hosts and the guests within that host. As well as, host by percent memory used, network utilization, and other key metrics around your virtual infrastructure. A datacenter consists of many different elements, from your servers to your network devices to the backend storage infrastructure. Each of them alone are just a piece of the puzzle. However, together they provide services to your end users. For example, your exchange application resides on one or more services, which we are connected to ports on network devices. Your users inboxes are stored in backend storage arrays. Perhaps you get a call that a user’s email is having problems. Now you can quickly determine what is causing the issue. In this specific case, a network switch is down, causing the exchange server to be inaccessible. Without groups, you may have wasted time in identifying the root cause. For more information, go to SolarWinds.com, where you can learn more about monitoring your datacenter and download a free evaluation. Thanks and have a great day.