Anyone who has worked at length with EMC Clariion or VNX would be familiar with the good old NAR files. These are the important little files where statistics about array performance are saved/archived, so you can them open them in Analyzer and review the massive amount of performance metrics and data stats from your array.
One tedious task when you want to do this, is the merging of the files to create your analysis timeline. Retrieve, browse, select merge, wait, browse, select, merge wait. Blah I have better things to do !
One rainy afternoon, with the assistance of some very mediocre coffee, I spent a couple of hours writing a powershell script to do just that. Take a bunch of NAR files in one location, merge them all together and give me one nice, big NAR file, that I can then analyze. The code is a bit raw and when I have more time I will condense it down, but it does work well 🙂…..and here it is;
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$target = 'C:\EMCFILES\Completed\' $source = 'C:\EMCFILES\Source\' ls $source\*.nar | sort Mode, Name |ft Name -Au -Hi | out-file $source\source.txt (GC $source\source.txt | Select-object -Skip 1) | SC $source\source.txt $newname = ((gc $source\source.txt)[0].substring(0,29))+".nar" $mover=(get-content $source\source.txt -totalcount 1);move-item $source\$mover $target\results.nar ForEach ($nar in (gc $source\source.txt)){ remove-item $target\temp.nar -confirm:$false -EA SilentlyContinue naviseccli -h arrayaddress analyzer -archivemerge -data $target\results.nar $source\$nar -out $target\temp.nar -overwrite y if (Test-Path $target\temp.nar){ copy-item $target\temp.nar $target\results.nar }} rename-item $target\results.nar $newname remove-item c:\EMCFILES\Source\* -recurse |
Requirements;
1. Save your collection of NAR files into “c:\EMCFILES\Source” Â Â (these will be deleted after completion)
2. Create “c:\EMCFILES\Completed” to store the output files
3. Make sure you have naviseccli installed and configured.
4. Change ‘arrayaddress‘ to the hostname/ip of your array
5. Execute from a powershell shell
6. Have some decent coffee available to you.
Script running in progress;
The script will roll the NAR files together into one contiguous file, and name it using the first 29 chars of the first NAR file in the source directory.
This naming works for me but can be easily changed. Enjoy.
Hey Brett,
What’s the biggest .nar file that you are able to view? Is there a hard limit within the java config (memory size) or just physical resources that may limit it?
Hi Abe, I’ve never hit a limit in practical use. Typically I’ll be analyzing 1 – 2 weeks of data so the NAR’s may have had a total size of up to a few hundred MB.
I’m certainly not aware of any limit, and couldn’t find once in the BP guides.
–Brett