Hitachi Blade Servers Test

The Hitachi Compute Blade allows accommodating up to eight dual-socket-based blade servers in the chassis. The blade servers are configured in redundant scenario to ensure high-availability and operation continuity and are powered by Intel Xeon processors. With this configuration, the Hitachi Compute Blade meets performance needs of large-scale systems that require extremely high compute power and I/O performance. Each blade server supports up to 30 logical partitions, which in turn simplifies building virtual environment and enables using virtualization to consolidate application and database servers. In addition, the blade servers provide flexible solution for scaling up your infrastructure without any complex requirements. Critical or fatal physical damages, power failures or network connectivity failures can render the blade servers unavailable/inoperable. This in turn degrades performance of the Hitachi Compute Blade. To prevent such eventualities, it is imperative that administrators should closely monitor the blade servers and take immediate measures before the clients complaint. This can be achieved by the Hitachi Blade Servers test!

By continuously monitoring each blade server in the chassis, administrators can obtain the overall health, power status and maintenance mode of each blade server. This way, administrators are alerted to abnormalities as soon as they occur and can take necessary corrective actions before mission-critical services begin to suffer. This test also reports the current voltage and power consumption of each blade server.

Target of the test : Hitachi Compute Blade

Agent deploying the test : An external agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each blade server on the Hitachi Compute Blade being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the tests
TEST PERIOD - How often should the test be executed Host – The IP address of the Hitachi Compute Blade. PORT - The port at which the monitored target listens. By default, this is set to NULL. SnmpPort – The port at which the Hitachi Compute Blade exposes its SNMP MIB; the default is 161. SNMPVERSION – By default, the eG agent supports SNMP version 1. Accordingly, the default selection in the snmpversion list is v1. However, if a different SNMP framework is in use in your environment, say SNMP v2 or v3, then select the corresponding option from this list. SNMPCommunity – The SNMP community name that the test uses to communicate with the firewall. This parameter is specific to SNMP v1 and v2 only. Therefore, if the snmpversion chosen is v3, then this parameter will not appear. username – This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the snmpversion. SNMP version 3 (SNMPv3) is an extensible SNMP Framework which supplements the SNMPv2 Framework, by additionally supporting message security, access control, and remote SNMP configuration capabilities. To extract performance statistics from the MIB using the highly secure SNMP v3 protocol, the eG agent has to be configured with the required access privileges – in other words, the eG agent should connect to the MIB using the credentials of a user with access permissions to be MIB. Therefore, specify the name of such a user against the username parameter. CONTEXT – This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVERSION. An SNMP context is a collection of management information accessible by an SNMP entity. An item of management information may exist in more than one context and an SNMP entity potentially has access to many contexts. A context is identified by the SNMPEngineID value of the entity hosting the management information (also called a contextEngineID) and a context name that identifies the specific context (also called a contextName). If the USERNAME provided is associated with a context name, then the eG agent will be able to poll the MIB and collect metrics only if it is configured with the context name as well. In such cases therefore, specify the context name of the USERNAME in the CONTEXT text box. By default, this parameter is set to none. authpass– Specify the password that corresponds to the above-mentioned username. This parameter once again appears only if the snmpversion selected is v3. confirm password– Confirm the authpass by retyping it here. authtype – This parameter too appears only if v3 is selected as the SNMPversion. From the AuthType list box, choose the authentication algorithm using which SNMP v3 converts the specified username and password into a 32-bit format to ensure security of SNMP transactions. You can choose between the following options: MD5 - Message Digest Algorithm SHA - Secure Hash Algorithm SHA224 - Secure Hash Algorithm 224 bit SHA256 - Secure Hash Algorithm 256 bit SHA384 - Secure Hash Algorithm 384 bit SHA512 - Secure Hash Algorithm 512 bit encryptflag– This flag appears only when v3 is selected as the snmpversion. By default, the eG agent does not encrypt SNMP requests. Accordingly, the encryptflagis set to no by default. To ensure that SNMP requests sent by the eG agent are encrypted, select the yes option. encrypttype – If the EncryptFlag is set to Yes, then you will have to mention the encryption type by selecting an option from the EncryptType list. SNMP v3 supports the following encryption types: DES - Data Encryption Standard 3DES - Triple Data Encryption Standard AES - Advanced Encryption Standard AES128 - Advanced Encryption Standard 128 bit AES192 - Advanced Encryption Standard 192 bit AES256 - Advanced Encryption Standard 256 bit encryptpassword – Specify the encryption password here. confirm password – Confirm the encryption password by retyping it here. TIMEOUT - Specify the duration (in seconds) within which the SNMP query executed by this test should time out in the TIMEOUT text box. The default is 10 seconds. DATA OVER TCP – By default, in an IT environment, all data transmission occurs over UDP. Some environments however, may be specifically configured to offload a fraction of the data traffic – for instance, certain types of data traffic or traffic pertaining to specific components – to other protocols like TCP, so as to prevent UDP overloads. In such environments, you can instruct the eG agent to conduct the SNMP data traffic related to the monitored target over TCP (and not UDP). For this, set the data over tcp flag to Yes. By default, this flag is set to No. ENGINEID - This parameter appears only when v3 is selected as the SNMPVersion. Sometimes, the test may not report metrics when AES192 or AES256 is chosen as the Encryption type. To ensure that the test report metrics consistently, administrators need to set this flag to Yes. By default, this parameter is set to No.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement

Description

Measurement Unit

Interpretation

Health status

Indicates the current health of this blade server.

The values that this measure can report and the numeric values they indicate have been listed in the table below:

State	Numeric Value
Unknown	0.5
No Blade Server is Installed	0
Normal	1
Failed	2

Note:

By default, this measure can report the States mentioned above while indicating the health of each blade server. However, the graph of this measure is indicated using the numeric equivalents.

PowerSupply status

Indicates the current power supply status of this blade server.

The values that this measure can report and the numeric values they indicate have been listed in the table below:

State	Numeric Value
PowerOff	1
Standby	2
PowerOn	3
Unknown	4
PowerOn Executing	5
PowerOff Executing	6

Note:

By default, this measure can report the States mentioned above while indicating the current power supply status of each blade server. However, the graph of this measure is indicated using the numeric equivalents.

Current voltage

Indicates the current voltage of this blade server.

Volts

A sudden and significant rise in the value of this measure could be a cause of concern.

Power consumption

Indicates the amount of power consumed by this blade server.

Amps

Compare the value of this measure across the blade servers to figure out which blade server is power-intensive.

Primary Status

Indicates whether/not this blade server is primary.

The values that this measure can report and the numeric values they indicate have been listed in the table below:

State	Numeric Value
Primary	1
Non Primary	2
Unknown	3

Note:

By default, this measure can report the States mentioned above while indicating the whether/not this blade server is primary. However, the graph of this measure is indicated using the numeric equivalents.

Maintenance mode

Indicates the current maintenance mode of this blade server.

The values that this measure can report and the numeric values they indicate have been listed in the table below:

Mode	Numeric Value
Normal	1
CE Maintenance Mode	2
User Maintenance Mode	3
Unknown	4

Note:

By default, this measure can report the Modes mentioned above while indicating the current maintenance mode of the blade server. However, the graph of this measure is indicated using the numeric equivalents.