To access the online help for Storage Essentials, access Storage Essentials, and click Help > For this page or Help > Documentation Center. The Documentation Center provides the documentation set for Storage Essentials, including the PDFs, online help, release notes, and support matrices.

Figure 3 Accessing the Documentation Center

To manage and monitor your elements in Storage Essentials, discover your elements.

When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, Discovery and Discovery Data Collection are performed using HP SIM’s discovery user interface pages. This allows you to use credentials and perform discovery and data collection tasks in HP SIM and enables hardware and software health status polling, monitoring, and event management for storage, servers, switches, infrastructure, and other elements on your network, such as enclosures, racks, clients and printers. In addition, HP SIM provides standards-based support for HP and third-party devices and integration with HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) Software and other third-party management frameworks.

IMPORTANT: When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, if you initiate discovery from the HP Storage Essentials Discovery Setup page, you will significantly limit the functionality of the integrated solution. The HP Storage Essentials discovery pages are designed primarily for HP Storage Essentials when it is used as a standalone product. In an integrated environment, the HP Storage Essentials Discovery Setup pages can be used for troubleshooting discovery issues specific to HP Storage Essentials or to enable product health monitoring. For more information, see ”Troubleshooting” on page 685.

See ”Discovering Switches, Storage Systems, NAS Devices, and Tape Libraries” on page 19 and ”Discovering Applications, Backup Hosts and Hosts” on page 83.

Storage Essentials runs on a central server, and it relies upon CIM extension to provide information about hosts and applications. A CIM extension is a small software program that gathers information about a host and its applications. The CIM extension then provides the information it has gathered to Storage Essentials. If you want to monitor a host and its applications, install a CIM extension on the host. Refer to the Storage Essentials Installation Guide for more information on how to install CIM extensions.

Storage Essentials can simplify your complex environment and lower your cost of management with CIM-based integrated storage management. The management software integrates the management of applications, servers, storage networks, and storage systems in a single, easy-to-implement and intuitive solution.

The management server integrates the various components in the storage area network infrastructure into a CIM/WBEM/SMI standards-based database, so you can eliminate any vendor

HP Storage Essentials SRM 6.0 User Guide

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