I covered the release of Stormons 1.3.2 GA here and mentioned a few of the highlights of the new version. In between doing some vCD stuff and the general faffing about that seems to happen at this time of year, I’ve had a chance to install it on my lab PC and monitor our two CX4-120s. I’m not going to regurgitate the installation manual (which can be downloaded from here). I thought it might be more useful if I covered off the bits that weren’t obvious to me when I first installed the product. Note that if you’re used to deploying web apps and familiar with Apache configuration files, you won’t have as much of an issue with getting this working as I did. As it happens, I’m more idiot than savant when it comes to these things so it took me a little longer than it should have to get going.

Windows Server 2003 is listed as the supported OS. I used 32-bit Windows 7, as that was the OS on my laptop at the time. I used Apache 2.2 as the web server. There’s a bunch of supported models listed in the installation guide, but I’ve only used this product with EMC CLARiiON CX4 arrays. I can’t speak for its usefulness with NetApp FAS, EMC Symmetrix, EMC Celerra or Brocade FC devices.

I copied the extracted (and renamed) installation files to C:\tools\ and set the System Variable accordingly. Here’re the changes I made to my httpd.conf file to get things working. If I’ve done things really badly, feel free to chime in.

The first bit is to add a Directory for the location of the SM1.3 installation.

# STORMONS 
<Directory "C:/tools/SM1.3/http">
SetEnv STORMONS_HOME "C:/tools/SM1.3"
AllowOverride None
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

I then added in Aliases for the /SM and other directories.

# STORMONS
Alias /SM "C:/tools/SM1.3/http"
Alias /capa_spk "C:/tools/SM1.3/repository/capacity/spk"
Alias /perf_spk "C:/tools/SM1.3/repository/performance/spk"

I also uncommented the .cgi handler under

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

And that was it from the Apache side of things. After that I ran through the Stormons configuration as per the installation guide, setting paths to various binaries, etc. Note that if you’ve just copied RRDtool from the internet it’s worth running it first. I was missing the msvcr100.dll and it was crapping out without my knowledge (re-installing the Visual Studio 2008 redistributable fixed that). When you’re installing the Stormons polling service, make sure that you’re running a command prompt with sufficient privileges to install services, or you won’t get any useful results. I’m still having problems with RRDtool drawing pictures, but I’m working on that.

I’m hoping to do a more thorough run-through on some of the stuff you can do with Stormons in the next week or two.

Didier from Stormons recently got in contact (I knew a degree in French would eventually come in handy for something) to let me know that Stormons 1.3.2 GA has now been released. I’ve been meaning to give this tool a run in the lab for a while now, and I’m hopeful that I can do something in the next few weeks when work gets a bit quieter. You can download pre-compiled Windows (32 and 64-bit) binaries or Linux source code here. I won’t go into all of the features now, but here’re a few highlights:

In terms of the code, it is comprised of 43000 lines of Perl 5.14, 70 HTML reports, a multi-threaded engine and a scheduler.

Some reports offer the ability to compare configurations between two dates (helpful for trending and capacity planning).

Detailed alerts can be created.

“Storage Classes” can be created and used as a basis for Chargeback reports.

There’s a bunch of other features, including support for Brocade fabric traffic monitoring and some Nagios integration. And, as mentioned previously, there’s 70 HTML reports covering RAID Groups, CX Storage Pools, MirrorView, NetApp Volumes, Celerra LUNs, and so on. The program has been written for storage admins by a storage admin. I’m looking forward to testing it out on our CX4s, and Mat might even have a little less work to do as a result.