Tuning Manager continued

OK

I've got Tuning Manager up and running now (this is version 5). I've configured the software to pick up data from 5 arrays, which are a mixture of USP, NSC and 9980. The data is being collected via two servers - each running the RAID agent.

After 5 days of collecting, here are my initial thoughts;

1. The interface looks good; a drastic improvement on the previous version.
2. The interface is quick; the graphs are good and the operation is intuitive.
3. The presented data is logically arranged and easy to follow.

However there are some negatives;

1. Installation is still a major hassle; you've got to be 100% sure the previous version is totally uninstalled or it doesn't work.
2. RAID agent configuration (or rather I should call it creation) is cumbersome and has to be done at the command line; the installation doesn't install the tools directory onto your command line path, so you have to trawl to the directory (or install something like "cmdline here").
3. The database limit is way too small; 16,000 objects simply isn't enough (an object is a LUN, path etc). I don't want to install lots of instances, especially when the RAID agent isn't supported under VMware.

Overall, so far this version is a huge improvement and makes the product totally usable. I've managed to set the graph ranges to show data over a number of days and I'm now spending more time digging into the detail; Tuning Manager aggregates data up to an hourly view. The next step is to use Performance Reporter to look at some realtime detail....