My role as a Systems Administrator and storage provisioner often results in requests for additional space, usually from an Oracle database administrator. This often provides a challenge, as working under a very limited budget we often have to re-allocate resources. We decided to try out Veritas Operations Manager before looking at Veritas Operations Manager Advanced.
Using Veritas Operations Manager helps in the monitoring of the disk space and also allows one to view the tablespaces quickly of the databases, so one can tell if there's room for the Database Administrators to adjust the sizes of the tablespaces. In most of my cases, where there is not more space available on the Oracle's filesystem and all tablespaces are full, I've been able to look at the free space of my other VXVM filesystems and re-allocate from there (Attachment 3, vomimg03), including the ones within the same cluster, but I have had some instances where there's been over 10G of free tablespace overlooked when there's been request for small amount (5G) of expansion. The graphs from VOM's tablespace easily shows where this can be re-allocated (See Featured Image).
There are tons of other great things about VOM that have helped me out in my days as a System Administrator. It's shown me that there have been LUN paths down that I didn't know about (attachment 2, vomimg02), and that there are some VCS monitors have faulted. It helps greatly with upgrades to the VCS environment, by letting me know which versions are running on which systems, so I can coordinate upgrades quickly and easily without having to track down which ones have been done, which often happens when there are many other sysadmins. Additionally, the product has helped to track down which LUN is represented from the Array by giving me the mapping of the LUN name to the enclosure to the VxVM name (Attachment 01, vomimg01),which is helpful if you're receiving errors in your logs about one of your LUNs. The way that these features can nicely integrate within a VCS cluster really made the product a powerful time-saving tool for me.
The product is free, so I recommend trying it and see if it works for you. There are many many more features (self-patching, hotfixes, ...) that I still haven't had the time to take advantage of, even after using it for more than a year.