BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware Release Notes for v2.7.00

Starting with version 2.7.00, BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware is able to monitor external disk arrays, fiber switches and tape libraries in a SAN (Storage Area Network).
The storage-dedicated “connectors” that were previously in a separate package named “Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware” are now bundled with BMC Performance Manager. There is no need to install a separate add-on in order to monitor storage devices with BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware 2.7.00.
The purchase of a separate "Storage Monitoring" license is however still required in order to monitor a storage device with this version of BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware.

Discovers and monitors the enclosure and fiber-channel ports of Cisco SAN switches as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.) through the telnet or SSH interface.

Discovers and monitors the enclosure and fiber-channel ports of SAN switches as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.). It relies on the SNMP protocol and supports the Fibre Alliance MIB (FCMGMT-MIB).
Support for Brocade and McData SAN switches was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Discovers the enclosure and fiber-channel ports of SAN switches as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.). It relies on the WBEM technology and supports SMI-S compliant switches only.
Support for SMI-S compliant SAN switches was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Discovers and monitors the physical disks, disk arrays, logical drives, batteries and fiber ports of IBM DS3000 and DS4000 series disk arrays, as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans and power supplies). The solution requires the SMCli utility.

Discovers the enclosure and the disks of SAN disk arrays, as well as the storage pools and storage volumes. It will also discovery and monitor the FC ports of the array and the various environment sensors when available (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.). It relies on the WBEM technology and supports SMI-S compliant disk arrays only.
Support for SMI-S compliant disk arrays was available in the Storage Add-on for BPM Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Discovers and monitors the enclosure, the disks, aggregates, fiber and Ethernet ports of NetApp disk arrays (filers) as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.). It relies on the SNMP protocol.
Support for NetApp Filers was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Additional performance and statistics information is provided with the new BMC Performance Manager Express for NetApp Filers released at the same time as BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware 2.7.00.

Discovers and monitors the physical disks of a DDN disk array as well as the various environment sensors (temperatures, fans, power supplies) based on the disk array SNMP Agent.

Discovers the enclosure of a storage library as well as its specialized devices: tape drives, cartridges, media changers, etc.. It will also discovery and monitor the FC ports of the array and the various environment sensors when available (temperatures, fans, power supplies, etc.). It relies on the WBEM technology and supports SMI-S compliant tape libraries only.

Support for SMI-S compliant tape libraries was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Discovers and monitors the status of tape drives, media changers, fiber ports and environment sensors in Quantum and ADIC tape libraries through the Quantum/ADIC SNMP agent.

Discovers and monitors the status of tape drives, media changers, fiber ports and environment sensors in StorageTek LSeries and StreamLine (SL) tape libraries through their SNMP agent.
This new version adds the tape library serial number, IP Address, Ethernet Address as well as robotics and cleaning cartridge monitoring to the LSeries tape libraries.
Support for StorageTek LSeries and StreamLine tape libraries was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Discovers and monitors the status of tape drives, media changers, fiber ports and environment sensors in IBM 3584 (TotalStorage 3xxx) tape libraries through their SNMP Agent.

Discovers the HBA adapters in a server. It relies on the WBEM technology and supports SMI-S compliant HBAs only. Support for SMI-S compliant HBA cards was available in the Storage Add-on for BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware version 1.0.00.

Provides hardware status information for the fiber channel HBA cards on IBM AIX systems.

Discovers and monitors the hardware components in Sun blade shared enclosures through the CMM SNMP Agent or SSH interface.

Discovers and monitors the hardware components in Sun blade servers through their ILOM out-of-band management card (SNMP or SSH).

Discovers and monitors the HP BladeSystem shared enclosure, the environment sensors, the integrated switches and the status of the installed blades. It relies on the telnet or SSH interface of the HP On-board Administrator management card.

Support for HP BladeSystem was already available in previous version based on the SNMP agent of the HP BladeSystem. The telnet/SSH-based solution provides more detailed information about the hardware components.

Gives environmental information (temperatures, fans, etc.) on several IPMI-enabled Sun servers through the ipmitool utility and the Microsoft IPMI driver.

Gives environmental information (temperatures, fans, etc.) on several IPMI-enabled Sun servers through the ipmitool utility and the ISM IPMI driver.

Provides disk monitoring through the LsiLogic MegaRAID SAS SNMP sub-agent which supports older and newer LSI MegaRaid SAS RAID controllers.

Provides information about physical disks and volumes of LSI Logic SAS RAID controllers through the lsiutil utility on Windows Systems.

Discovers and monitors the physical disks behind a hardware RAID controller in a Sun Solaris system.

Discovers and monitors the errors encountered by the tape drives on Sun Solaris systems.

Discovers and monitors each memory module in IBM RS/6000, pSeries, eServer p5 and p6 servers. Also monitors the memory errors as reported by the memory controller.

All 6.10.x versions of the IBM Director Agent are now fully supported. Note: the internal version number of IBM Director Agent 6.10 is actually 5.20.31.

The WMI interface of the HP Insight Management Agents is now supported. BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware no longer requires the SNMP layer to communicate with the HP Insight Management Agents in order to monitor an HP ProLiant system.

When both the WMI and SNMP interfaces are available, BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware automatically selects the SNMP interface as it consumes less system resources and is more firewall-friendly.

The psrinfo-based connector (SEN_HW_SunPsrinfo.hdf) discovers and monitors the processors on Sun Solaris systems.

On Sun Solaris servers able to report this information, BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware discovers the LEDs of the server (seen outside but also inside the chassis) and reports their status (on, off or blinking). An alert is triggered if a LED reports an internal failure.

New Classes

To better represent the hardware components of servers and storage devices, new classes have been created:

•	SEN_HW_TAPEDRIVE, representing tape drives

•	SEN_HW_CPUCORE, representing individual cores in a physical CPU package

•	SEN_HW_ROBOTICS, representing robotic mechanisms, like media changers in a tape library

•	SEN_HW_BATTERY, representing batteries in disk controllers and on motherboards.

Some hardware components that used to be presented with the SEN_HW_OTHERDEVICE generic class in previous versions of BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware now use the appropriate class.

Network and Fiber Traffic Monitoring

New parameters have been added to the SEN_HW_NETWORK class to monitor the traffic on Ethernet and fiber ports:

Network and Fiber Traffic Report

A new report is available on demand through the “Report” tab to visualize the traffic on the different ports of a system (server or fiber switch). The report can be displayed as a multi-parameter graph on Portal environment and it shows the total amount of data in gigabytes that were received and transmitted by each port on an hourly or daily basis.

Energy Usage Report

•	When the managed system is not able to report its power consumption, BMC Performance Manager Express for Hardware evaluates it based on the type of the discovered internal parts of the system and their activity.

•	A new report is available on demand through the “Report” tab to visualize the energy usage of the system in kWh (kilowatts hour) over several days, on an hourly or daily basis.

Unallocated Disk Space Monitoring

A new “Unallocated Space” parameter has been added to the SEN_HW_LOGICALDISK class to represent the disk space in storage pool available for allocation for a server. This parameter is available only when monitoring a disk array.

Capacity Report

A new class has been added to report various capacity and sizing metrics of the managed system:

•	Physical CPU Count, reports the number of physical processors (not counting cores)

•	Memory Size, reports the total size of physical memory

•	Total Physical Disk Size, reports the total size of all physical disks

•	Total Logical Disk Size, reports the total size of volumes handled by the disk controllers

•	Total Unallocated Space, reports the total amount of free space available on the disks (only on disk arrays)

•	Power Consumption, reports the power consumption (in Watts) of the system

•	Energy Usage, reports the energy usage of the system in kWh (kilowatts hour)

•	Connected Ethernet/Fiber Ports, reports the number of Ethernet and fiber connected ports