Host Resources Prerequisites and Configurations
Prior to configuring IT Analytics to discover your host inventory, you must identify the hosts for which you will be collecting data. For additional planning details, see
Understanding the Host Data Collection Process and
Before Discovering Hosts.
Host Access Privileges, Ports, and WMI Proxy Requirements
If you are using sudo to elevate access to root privileges, update the sudoers file:
• Sudoers file: /etc/sudoers
• Use the lists of the sudo commands (per OS) that are located on the Portal server in:
<Home>/opt/aptare/updates
• Comment out this line in the sudoers file: Defaults requiretty
Access Requirements by OS
Table 1 Host Resources Prerequisites by Operating System
Host OS | Host Access Requirements | Port Requirements | Notes |
Linux RH Linux SUSE CentOS AIX HP-UX Solaris | ssh or telnet must be enabled Some commands may require an account with super-user root privileges. sudo, sesudo, and pbrun are supported; ensure the user ID has required sudo, sesudo, or pbrun privileges. | ssh: 22 telnet: 23 | Collection uses ssh/telnet to execute commands. OS and application commands require root privileges for HBA API access. The sysstat utility must be installed on Linux servers or storage nodes for Linux host performance data collection. |
Windows | A WMI Proxy is required to collect from Windows hosts. All Windows hosts require a user ID with Administrator privileges for WMI. | RPC: TCP Port 135 for WMI DCOM: TCP/UDP 1024-65535 TCP/IP 1248, if WMI Proxy server is not the same as the Data Collector server | When the Data Collector Policy is configured to include file-level data, the Data Collector and WMI need to use a Windows Domain Administrator ID. |
Host Access Requirements
This section lists the access requirements for host resource data collection. You will use this information to populate the configurations used by the Host Discovery, Validation, and Collection processes.
• Access Control: For security reasons, most enterprise environments mandate access control where a new non-root account is created, with temporarily elevated access to the required commands provided via an access control command, such as sudo. Otherwise, the root user is required for host access. See
Manage Access Control. Files containing sudo commands per operating system can be found on the Portal server in: /opt/aptare/updates. These filenames contain both the OS and the version of the sudo commands file so that you can identify the files that contain the latest updates; for example: hpux_9.1.01, aix_9.1.01, linux_9.1.01, solaris_9.1.01.
• Path: APTARE IT Analytics must have knowledge of the correct paths to access commands. An overview of the requirements is listed here, with the details for determining paths provided in
Command Path Verification. For Windows hosts, a path is required for fcinfo, hbacmd, and scli commands. For Linux hosts, if the Data Collector is installed on a Windows server, use plink.exe to determine the path; if the Data Collector is installed on a Linux server, determine the path by executing ssh. See
Command Path Verification for details.
• HBA Prerequisites
• It is critical for the Data Collector to probe the HBA in order to establish a host’s relationship with storage. Without the HBA information, all storage for a host will be listed as local storage. APTARE IT Analytics uses an internal probing mechanism to gather Host Bus Adapter (HBA) data from Windows hosts.
• Windows: Either hbaverify, scli, hbacmd (required for both LUN Mapping and HBA data collection), or fcinfo.
• Linux: scli or hbacmd (required only for HBA information)
• Solaris: scli or hbacmd (required only for HBA information)
• HP-UX: fcmsutil (used only for HBA information; should already be installed by default)
For Linux Hosts Only
For Linux Hosts in access control environments (such as sudo):
• If a command such as sudo is used and the path is not in the interactive ssh, identify the absolute path of the access control command. See
Command Path Verification.
For Windows Hosts Only
• A WMI Proxy server is required for collecting data from Windows hosts. It is critical for the Data Collector to gather this data in order to establish a host’s relationship with storage. Without this information, all storage for a Windows host will be listed as local storage.
• Microsoft Exchange 2003: The Data Collector uses WMI for data collection.
• Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010: Data collection requires PowerShell remoting to be enabled on the Exchange server. The Data Collector connects to PowerShell via the WMI Proxy to execute the PowerShell commands. For details on remoting, see the Microsoft Administrator’s Guide to Windows PowerShell Remoting.
• Verify the method of collecting Windows HBA information. Windows Hosts require one of the following to determine SAN information:
• HBAnyware from Emulex
• SANsurfer Command Line Interface (SCLI) for Windows from QLogic (SCLI is a separate install from the base install of SANsurfer and often is not installed with the SANsurfer utility).
• Fibre Channel Information Tool (fcinfo) from Microsoft
Command Path Verification
Verify the command paths that will be used by the Data Collector.
Both Linux & Windows:
• If Volume Manager is installed on any hosts, note the path to the vxprint command.
• If any multi-pathing software is installed on hosts, note the path to the command.
Linux: Verify the non-interactive SSH path for Linux users for several sample hosts:
ssh <user>@<hostname> env
where <user> is the credential the collector will use to access the host.
To determine the Linux path from a Windows server, you can use a command-line interface to telnet/ssh client software. The following example shows Plink, which is a command-line interface to PuTTY (a telnet/ssh client):
plink <user>@<hostname> env
Example of a PATH for commands:
/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
Windows: Make a note of the paths for the executables identified for HBA data collection. Note that in Windows, multiple paths are separated by a semi-colon ( ; ). For example:
C:\Program Files\Emulex\Util\HBAnyware;C:\Program Files\QLogic\SANSurfer