I was asked a few days ago to run a tool against one of my ESX hosts. The tool is called nSANity and was supplied by my NetApp vendor. This application is designed to collect details of all SAN and fibre connectivity for end-to-end diagnosis. It takes this data and makes an XML report out of it. The reason I was requested to run this tool was so that data could be collected about a remote site and how it is currently connected to one of our NetApp SANs in preparation of a SAN data move to be performed by NetApp Professional Services.
Fig 1
The link for the software was supplied and I went to go retrieve this tool. I’m providing the link to the tool, but you will have to be a NetApp NOW member to download it. I get to the URL and start reading. I notice this right off the bat (see Fig 1). Hmm…. NetApp wants me to run this tool that they provide, yet they can not support you if you’re having trouble. Which I read as, “if this poops your machine, you’re on your own.”
Further reading gave me no indication of what kind of data was to be collected. In addition, the documentation mentions that you have to run this via SSH to the ESX Host as root. My company’s environment does not allow root access over SSH. It falls under the “No Fly Zone.” It’s forbidden, taboo, etc. Unfortunately, nSANity cannot be run locally on the ESX host. So I had to get an approval from Congress to allow root over SSH. (Ok, that’s an exaggeradtion, but that’s what it feels like.) Once I had the green light, I break out the fire extinguishers and prepare for the rapture of this ESX guinea pig.
The windows version of the tool runs very well on Windows 7. To fill in the blanks on how I ran this, I opened a command prompt (Run as Administrator) and then used the following command:
c:\> nsanity -d c:\temp vmware://root:*@esxhost.domain.com
The app runs for approximately ten minutes and collects configuration data on firewall rules, virtual switches, virtual nics, drives, cpu, processes, lspci, hbas, etc. Once the data was collected, root access via SSH had to be replugged. It seems harmless to the environment and the data collected doesn’t seem to fall under any security risks.
If you are having to run nSANity and aren’t familiar with the tool, I hope my experience with it provides some insight on how it works.
Thanks for this info. I have to run nSANity on our servers/NetApp here at work but I’m not exactly sure how this works because the documentation that comes with this app is not great. I’m kind of confused on what you need SSH for if you’re using a command prompt to execute the commands? Do you know if this app can be ran local on the server (not ESX) AIX is out servers? To view the results do you use a browser? Thanks for any replies.
There are two different methods to run this tool – the SSH method, and the commandline method. The SSH method involved logging onto the ESX host as root via SSH and running the command locally on the ESX Host. This was shot down by our security and VM Teams. Security would not allow the SSH Session as root (for accountability) and the VM Team wouldn’t agree to having a file SCP’d onto the console of the ESX Host to run. Therefore, I wound up running the windows version of this tool. And as the post states, it’s just that one command that is needed to run. While the documentation sucked ass (And that’s a compliment), your NetApp rep or tech support rep should be able to walk you through using the tool if you’re running into trouble. (They just won’t help if it *borks* your machine.