Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) Web Reporting

Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) is a data replication/protection software from NetApp. OSSV runs on Windows, UNIX/LINUX, and VMWare ESX servers and it replicates block level changes back to a NetApp filer. We use this technology to replicate the data on all of branch office servers back to our datacenter. This replication allowed us to remove the need to perform tape backups in each branch office.

One of the strengths of OSSV is its simplicity, but that is also it’s weakness. The reporting and monitoring capabilities of OSSV can be cumbersome. You can get a lot of status information from the filer itself via the snapvault status command. However, the one thing that you can’t tell from filer is how far along the process is. That information is only available when the snapvault status -l command is run on the primary system (your Windows/UNIX/VMWare server). With windows that means that you either need to get either console access (via. Remote Desktop, VNC, etc.) or command line access with something like PsExec.

We’ve been running this way for almost two years, but I finally got tired of all of the typing. So I developed a web based reporting tool that gathers all of information and presents it in a nice graphical clickable interface.

The front screen of this php web application displays the status of all currently configured snapvault relationships. It does this by executing the snapvault status via an encrypted ssh key-based session to the filer. The resulting output is shown below.

For each specific qtree you can click to get the detail about that status of that relationship just as if you had run the snapvault status -l command on the primary server. Thereby showing you how many files have been transferred, how far along you are on the current file and what errors have been encountered. All this is accomplished via winexe linux command. Winexe remotely executes commands on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003 systems from GNU/Linux just like PsExec does from windows.

If anyone is interested in using this, I can supply you with my really ugly code. Finally a big shout out the phpSysInfo project from where I borrowed the CSS styling.

Explore posts in the same categories: Net Management, Techie, Work

Tags: netapp ossv filer php web windows linux

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.