Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7

In the previous blog post in this series, I discussed how NetApp® Active IQ® Unified Manager 9.7 integrates with the Active IQ Portal to deliver community intelligence, risk assessments, and recommendations to both dark (secure) sites and nondark sites. Today’s post updates you about the active management capabilities, automation enhancements, and virtual ecosystem monitoring capabilities introduced with Unified Manager 9.7. Unified Manager has taken a paradigm shift to wow users with capabilities that will enable them to use one software application for most storage and operational management tasks, as well as the day-zero operational capabilities that NetApp ONTAP® System Manager 9.7 provides.

Intelligent provisioning—a ready framework for StaaS, hybrid-cloud deployments

You may wonder, why is there a need for provisioning capabilities in Unified Manager when you have ONTAP System Manager and ONTAP RESTful APIs? That’s a valid question. Let’s look at how Unified Manager’s provisioning capabilities can help your business needs. It starts with setting the right expectations. With this approach, you enable storage to be consumed against a performance level, thereby providing a modern framework to simplify your data management. You can use this approach for storage-as-a-service (StaaS) provisioning capabilities that will go a long way in planning a digital transformation with your on-premises infrastructure.

Intelligent provisioning can amplify your benefits in the following areas:

• Simplicity in storage service automation 
  • Enable policy-based provisioning and data management through storage abstractions 
  • Manage applications and data, not storage platform nuances

• Ready framework for building StaaS, hybrid-cloud deployments
  • Easy, REST API-based integration with tools in the IT ecosystem
  • ServiceNow, Ansible, Puppet, etc. 

• Economic benefits
  • Contain costs through ease of use and reduced incident management
  • Maximize investment through increased storage utilization with managed risk

These are complex policies, especially when you’re dealing with hundreds of workloads. Unified Manager gives you the right conformance to monitor these workloads and set up alarms for nonconformance.

Data Center Overview

Workload Overview

What about the workloads I already have?

For brownfield environments, you can leverage the analytics in Unified Manager, which are backed by multiple artificial and machine learning algorithms. The analytics recommend each workload that is not assigned to a Performance Service Level (PSL). You can also use Unified Manager to assign the recommended PSL to a workload or a group of workloads to suit your needs.

Monitoring VMware workloads through Unified Manager

Storage users and admins have always been at the receiving end of any issues at the application layer (pun intended). Unified Manager 9.7 adds the feature of allowing Unified Manager users to see how the individual VMs are being used. 

It’s easy to set up this monitoring; all you need is your vCenter credentials. You can add the vCenter with just two clicks. Then give it a bit of time for polling. You will have the VM-level data in about 30 to 60 minutes.  You can also check the latency and I/O pattern for each VM that traverses from the compute to the storage through the topological representation presented for each VM. 

This is the first release of Unified Manager that adds a VM visibility stack, and we plan to continue the journey by providing more granular information in the next releases. Please let us know what granularity would mean to you and to your business. 

Conclusion

Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7 has been a mammoth release—it took me three blog posts just to describe some of the salient features at a high level! We would love to hear from you about what excites you with this release and what you want to know more about. 

For more information

Watch this video demonstration of "What’s new in Active IQ Unified Manager 9.7".   Additional videos:

• Active IQ Unified Manager – VMware Awareness
• Active IQ Unified Manager - Provisioning