Overview

Two fictitious Data Centers called the Snake and the Samish has a storage environment consisting of 97 storage arrays. The SAN infrastructure consists of 78 director class fiber channel switches with over 24,000 host intiators and over 1,900 storage target ports. The SOS and Mojo organizations are the two primary tenants of the data centers. At any given time, there are about a million IOs in flight among the two data centers.

The Venom module is a collection of PowerShell scripts that ease the burden of maintaining a storage infrastructure of this scale. This module is designed for the storage engineer who is in the trenches and desires quick access to SAN information.

Both PowerShell and this module are used daily for reporting on SAN inventory, capacity and performance data. A goal of the module is not to become the authoritive source for any SAN information but rather be a simple interface for presenting authoritive SAN information from various storage devices in real-time. Having quick access to key SAN information, allows the storage engineer to quickly identify potential issues and then launch the appropriate management tool for deeper analysis.

The listing of scripts below are in the process being converted to be cmdlets available through the Venom module. A varity of access methods are used communicate with the storage devices, including native CLI, RESTAPI, and the SSH protocol.

All the scripts are functioning today indivdually on Windows 10 and I'm going through the labor of converting them to be available in Venom module.

cmdlets currently available in the Venom module

cmdlet Description Version Date Author
Show-VePureHostVols Show hosts disk volumes on PureStorage array 0.0.2.4 07/29/2017 cadayton
Copy-VePureHostVol Create PureStorage SNAP volume 0.0.2.4 07/29/2017 cadayton
Get-VeArrayInfo Storage array inventory & capacity data. 0.0.2.0 07/07/2017 cadayton
Update-VeArrayInfo Updates capacity data for most storage arrays. 0.0.2.1 07/10/2017 cadayton
Get-VeSymmMetrics View various Symmetrix performance data. 0.0.2.0 07/07/2017 cadayton
Set-VeSymmAlias Set Symm Aliases or View FA login entries 0.0.2.3 07/20/2017 cadayton
Find-VeSymmAlias Search for specific FA login in entries 0.0.2.3 07/20/2017 cadayton
Start-VeUnisphere Launch Unisphere given a SID 0.0.2.3 07/20/2017 cadayton
Start-VeVappManager Launch VappManager given a SID 0.0.2.3 07/20/2017 cadayton
Start-VeEcomConfig Launch EcomConfig interface given a SID 0.0.2.3 07/20/2017 cadayton
Get-VePureMetrics View various Pure Storage performance data 0.0.2.0 07/10/2017 cadayton
Set-VeDeviceAlias Automates setting Cisco device-aliases 0.0.2.2 07/16/2017 cadayton
Connect-VeFabric Discovers Cisco Fabric Domains 0.0.2.2 07/16/2017 cadayton
Update-VeFlogi Maintain Cisco switch flogi entries 0.0.2.2 07/16/2017 cadayton
Enable-VePorts Automates enabling of Cisco ports 0.0.2.2 07/16/2017 cadayton

Some functionality of these cmdlets will not be available until all of the PowerShell scripts have been converted to module cmdlets.

The module can be installed on either a Windows desktop for individual usage or centrally on a Windows server for centralized usage.

After installing the module and the prerequisites, the Get-VeArrayInfo cmdlet needs to be executed to create the XMLDB files, located in the folder, ArrayInfo. Both the folder and XMLDB files are created automatically upon the first execution. I recommend using Visual Studio Code to update the XMLDB file to match your storage environment, but any ASCII editor will work too. See the XMLDB documentation for further details.

Since each of the cmdlets will depend upon a specific underlining folder structure, pick a common folder location where upon all cmdlets will be executed. Each cmdlet will automatically create the needed folders. See the individual cmdlet documentation for specific folder dependencies. Each cmdlet provides command line help and can be displayed by entering the following command for each cmdlet.

Get-Help Get-VeArrayInfo -full

PowerShell scripts currently being converted to Venom module cmdlets

Script Description
Get-VPlexMetrics Reports on VPlex performance by downloading data via SSH and using RESTAPI.
Get-SRDFInfo Out-Gridview of all SRDF sessions in the xml DB file.
Update-SRDFInfo Builds inventory of SRDF sessions and creates devicefile for each SRDF Session.
Get-SANInfo Display of ISL and Port-Channels in the Cisco SAN Fabrics.