4. Unisphere for PowerMax - Leveraging Dell AIOPs (formerly CloudIQ)

This guide explains how to leverage Dell AIOps in Unisphere for PowerMax. It shows how Unisphere sends data to Dell AIOps for analysis and generates recommendations for remediation. The guide walks through the home dashboard view, the Dell AIOPs page, and provides examples of recommendations for issues related to capacity, vWitness configuration, effective capacity, and suspended Metro sessions.

Leveraging AIOps using Dell AIOPs

In this lesson we will explain how to leverage Dell AIOPs in Unisphere for PowerMax.

With Dell PowerMaxOS 10.1, Dell AIOPs adds an AI/ML-based predictive analytics engine to predict imminent behavior on storage and, with the new AIOps engine, can recommend actions to remediate them proactively. The system can predict capacity headroom and suggest how to reclaim unused storage. The AIOps engine will analyze performance bottlenecks and provide details on balancing workloads. Additionally, Dell AIOPs and PowerMax/PowerStore have intelligent anomaly detection based on pattern detection of performance, capacity, or data reduction. The Dell AIOPs remediation engine provides recommendations on the following: - When and where to enable or disable data reduction for optimum performance and capacity - Data mobility recommendations for optimal use of the infrastructure - QoS recommendations to prevent noisy neighbors or other performance-related issues - I/O Port rebalancing by distributing traffic via PowerPath - Deployment best practice recommendations, such as virtual witness deployment suggestions

If you are starting the lab with this section, you will have to first login to the Unisphere UI. Double-click **U4V Demo** icon on the desktop. Login to **Unisphere** with the following settings: - Username: **smc** - Password: **smc**

If not already here, please return to the **Overview** Page from the left menu. Click "**Overview**" please select the PowerMax array "**1202000107**"

The **Overview** page for a specific storage system provides a view of its status in terms of performance, system health, storage group compliance, capacity, and replication. If we look at the middle pane - **Health Score**, the system Health Score can help you spot where your most severe health issues are, based on the following core factors: **Configuration, Capacity, Data Protection,** and **Performance**. The area with the highest risk to your system health affects the health score until remedial actions are taken. The **Capacity** health score is influenced by the Capacity Prediction analytics algorithm, which forecasts when the SRP is predicted to be full, based on historical capacity usage. Dell AIOPs sends a health score deduction to Unisphere for PowerMax if the predicted range is within a quarter or less. The severity of the deduction is based on the imminency of reaching full. If we scroll down through the **Total Issues** list, click "**SRP**" for **Capacity Health Score**

This brings us to the **CloudIQ Feed** page. Unisphere can send data to Dell AIOPs that is related to configuration, performance, health scores, alerts, and security settings. Dell AIOPs then analyzes this data and where it detects issues, it generates recommendations for remediation. These recommendations are sent to Unisphere, and are visible in the **CloudIQ Feed**. As we can see, the first entry has resulted in a Health Score deduction of 10 where **Effective Capacity in SRP_1(FBA) is predicted to be full on 000120200107...** Please select the first entry, and we will see additional information in the right hand pane.

As we can see, we are now alerted to the fact that our SRP (Storage Resource Pool) is nearly full, and at current usage, will be full within a quarter. We are also given recommendations to delete certain SG's which are not currently in use. Please click "**Review**"

Here we are presented with a recommended job to delete the specified SG's -**Finance_SG_13** and **Email_sg** The deletion is not currently supported in this Demo Edition. Click "**Cancel**"

We are now returned to the **CloudIQ Feed** Lets click on the **second** entry for additional details on it. As we can see, here we are being told that there is only 1 vWitness configured, and being recommended to create an additional one. If the current vWitness becomes unavailable, the protected Metro groups 2,52 will revert to bias mode. The Virtual Witness feature supports a third party that the two storage systems consult when they lose connectivity with each other, that is, their SRDF links go out of service. When SRDF links go out of service, the Witness helps to determine, for each SRDF/Metro Session, which of the storage systems should remain active (volumes continue to be read and write to hosts) and which goes inactive (volumes not accessible).

If we click on the **third** entry, we can see that this is also related to **Effective Capacity** where the Effective capacity is predicted to be full within a month for SRP_1 on 000120200107. This time the recommendation to add additional cache memory to the system to further scale out. Lets move on to the final entry

Please click on the **last** entry

As we can see from the details section, we have a Metro Session in a suspended state. The recommendation is to run the Establish Job to reactivate these SRDF/Metro sessions

Lastly, if we wanted to check Dell AIOPs recommendations for ALL arrays visible to this instance of Unisphere, we can return to the Overview page. Please click "**Overview**"

From here, click "**Events > CloudIQ Feed**"

As we can see from below, this returns us to the **CloudIQ Feed**, and if we had alerts from other arrays, they would appear here also. However, for the purposes of the demo, we only have recommendations from array **120200107**.

Congratulations! You have reached the end of this particular lesson. Click **Close** in the top left corner of this script to return to the demo guide.