Here is my issue, we have 170 unix servers , 80 ESX servers and many Windows (2003/2008)s pread across 3 EMC Clariions and 2 VMAX in which I want to perform host grabs on all the servers prior to flare code upgrade as well as , sort of, forcing server team to install powerpath instead of native agents.We have all flavors of OS from Windows, Unix, Linux, AIX, etc we have it all.
We have been frequently receiving issue related to one path going invisible .Lately, this case has increased a lot and all the root cause for this is native path not configured properly.
I need to know what is the simplest way to accomplish this task because the difficulty is that I have these servers with 10 different system admins for all these servers. My problem is that it takes too much coordination and time spent with each Admin to get them to run the grab utility on each of their servers and have them each send me the Grab output for each host. This is too much work for one storage admin to supervise since I have to email them the grab program with instruction. Then I have to make sure they each send back the grab output file to me to upload the result to EMC.
Does anyone have a strategy or suggestion on how to make this process easier???
can i create an easy manual in which i specify the steps to be done? I request somebody help me finding the steps .Just the link in Powerlink i have been trying looking in there but to no avail.
I like your idea of having the groups make it a habit of running grabs on a routine basis. But how would they automate that?
Is there a script that easily be written on each host to run the emc grab weekly and dump it somewhere? So I assume this would be a schedule such like "Scheduled Tasks" in Windows or "crontab" in Unix.
If anyone has any samples on how to write that script please do share.
I will very much appreciate a help !
Thanks for reading
A scheduled script is certainly simple enough on Windows, ESX and any Linux variant and should be straightforward on most others. You are unlikely to get anything to work if you have ESXi though and since VMware are moving solely to that model for the Hypervisor on all future versions you might want to look at other ways of getting that data for them.
You will have to write the script yourself for each platform, test that it works and ensure that they run properly without any interaction. My experience of the EMC grab utility is that it is quite interactive by default (licensing questions, asks for administrator\support contact details etc) but there are options that should make it silent and any script will end up being not much more than a single command ( e.g emcgrab.sh -nomsg on ESX) followed by a command to upload the output file to a centralised location.
All of this could be done remotely but would require that you have root\admin access to the systems in question which is probably not likely.
To ensure this becomes less of an issue you could make the scheduled task a pre-requisite for having any SAN storage provisioned in future but that's not really going to help you now.