HP SSSU Overview

So in my experience with the EVAs, I can say I have come across many challenges in finding good user experience documentation (outside of the normal pdf’s the HP machine churns out) and support. The HP forums have been somewhat helpful, but sifting through them, using their search or the googalizer, are less than user friendly. Good information at times to be had, but still overly difficult.

So it is with that preface that I arrive at discussing the SSSU: HP’s Storage Scripting System Utility. The premise of this utility is to allow command line access to an EVA. The idea is, at least from HP’s perspective, to use it for repetitious activities that would be otherwise tiresome in Command View. Additionally, you can also issue interactive commands like restarting a controller or changing mastership for disks between controllers manually. HP bundles the SSSU installer with Command View’s installer package. It carries the same versioning as Command View (so in my case, 9.1.0).

SSSU seems like a really great idea. I love the command line (being very partial to a bash shell ), but SSSU isn’t a real CLI in that sense. The first round of trouble is in the output: SSSU generates XML based output that a human can’t simply open up and read. This throws out a simple way to grab information that would otherwise take a lot of time via CV. This posting is an overview of SSSU, and I will write a follow up post that goes more into depth on what you can do with the output to make it actually usable in conjunction with Microsoft’s Logparser tool. Sad I know. You can pony up big $ to get actual tools but hey, in tight times, stretching the imagination is better than stretching the wallet. I’ll also put up some of the scripts I use to gather data on disks and such (ex: easy way to track disk size and growth).

At this point, let’s get SSSU fired up and play around a bit. To launch, log into your CV server and run that fancy icon on the desktop. One quick gripe: no way for me to install this on my own laptop to just run and connect with. To get around that, I copy over from the CV install to my local machine the SSSU.exe file. It runs great and it’s just that less than 2 meg file. Upon launching it, you get to login.

You get three parts to a login:

You can login with a domain account without any issue, so you don’t have to create a whole separate user account list. One thing to note is that although you can fire up multiple SSSU windows to one array, you can only execute commands to it one at a time (serial baby!), so when one command is running in one window, your other windows would hang if you tried to execute a command).

After logging in, you are sitting at a default path, so to speak. That being that you have not selected your array.

Hitting ? and enter will list off all the commands available. This can also be used to find out what options each command has available.

Object names are case sensitive and are organized in a root tree system. Commands and objects with spaces in their names require double quotes. The first thing to do is select an EVA to work with, using the term select system.

You can flip around using the select system command. At this time there isn’t a way to issue group commands (outside of scripting, and even then it’s not a group command, in that sense).

Root Structure of Objects:

\Hosts

“\Disk Groups”

“\Virtual Disks”

\Hardware

Note that you can create objects (like folders) under all but \Hardware. Objects created are purely for human organization. The EVA doesn’t care if you have them or not (though if you do create them you need to be aware of the “path” to them.

A complete listing of the commands can be found in the SSSU reference doc, found here:

http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02493404/c02493404.pdf

This link is for the latest (I believe rolled into Command View 9.3) as of this date (9.23.2010).

My advice would be to look through the command reference to understand what the commands do. Listing them all out here in a blog post would be silly. And a lot of work, and I’m lazy, so….

As promised before, I will follow up this post with a more in-depth guide for where SSSU is handy and probably some more complaints on how it’s irritating. J

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. Specializing in VDI and Cloud project designs. Awarded VMware vExpert status for 2012 & 2011. VCP3, VCP5, VCA-DT, VCP5-DT, Cisco UCS Design