September 9, 2010

ONTAP 8.0.1 RC1 Available

The NOW site shows ONTAP 8.0.1 RC1 available for download as of today: https://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/software/ontap/8.0.1RC1/

At the time of this post all the links for release notes show a page not found, hopefully more information will be available shortly.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Adding Native NetApp Storage to V-Series

One thing to be aware of if you are adding NetApp storage to the V-Series controller – you need to check the environment settings for fc-non-array-adapter.  The value for this setting is the port name that connects to locally attached (eg NetApp disk) storage.  If you don’t do this you risk panicking BOTH filers (if it isn’t set and you connect the loop into both controllers).  Without this properly set the panic message you may receive is:
PANIC: sanown: received add for already known disk in process sanown_notify……
In order to check this setting you need to do a cf takeover and press ctrl-c on the other node to bring it to the loader prompt.  From there run printenv and look for the value of fc-non-array-adapter.  For this customer the value was 1a,2a,1b,2b because there was 2 multi path loops of NetApp FC disk.  1c and 2c were used for non-NetApp storage that was presented to the V-Series so those ports didn’t need to be listed.  To add a loop of SATA I had to add 1d and 2d in there as well.
fc-non-array-adapter "1a,2a,1b,2b,1d,2d"
followed by
boot_ontap
I assume the reason this setting may seem “backwards” is because prior to 7.3 you weren’t able to connect NetApp shelves to a V-Series controller so by default it assumes the initiator ports are connecting to other vendors.  It’d be nice if in the future you can hot add a NetApp shelf without needing to do a cluster failover to check/change the environment variable.

Popularity: 9% [?]

NetApp Flash Cache and 64 bit Aggregates

I was talking with a local NetApp SE the other day and the subject came up about the Flash Cache (formerly Performance Acceleration Module, or PAM) card and 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8.0  The issue, he told me, is that currently the Flash Cache cards are not compatible with 64 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 – however they do work with 32 bit aggregates in ONTAP 8 and of course in ONTAP 7G.

I wasn’t able to find anything on the NOW site to confirm or deny this, he mentioned this only affected the newer PCIe based Flash Cache cards (256GB and 512GB)  the older, original PAM card (16GB) does work with 64bit aggregates.

The only thing I can find on the NOW site that talks about 64bit aggregates with PAM is from TR-3786:

10.6 PERFORMANCE ACCELERATION MODULE

A Performance Acceleration Module (PAM) can optimize the performance of your random read intensive workloads such as file services and messaging. PAM works with 64-bit aggregates as well as 32-bit aggregates and caches data that is coming from volumes located in both types of aggregates. PAM caches data based on data access regardless of the aggregate type.

The data cached in PAM while the system is in operation depends on the workload, and it can be a combination of data from volumes contained in different aggregates. There is no way to let PAM cache data only from a particular aggregate type. As noted in other sections of this document, 64-bit aggregates have a bigger address space and also take more memory for their metadata than 32-bit aggregates. This might reduce the total amount of effective data that can be cached in PAM when used with 64-bit aggregates present in the system.

However since they are referring to it as PAM and not Flash Cache I’m not sure if they are talking about the 16GB card that the NetApp SE said would still work or if this document is saying the newer card will work too and just hasn’t been updated to reflect the new product name.  Anyone out there able to shed some light on this?  I would love to know the details.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Use ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode Simulator on ESX

If you want to use the ONTAP 8.0 7-mode simulator in ESX the process is actually pretty simple, personally I wish NetApp would just offer an OVF format for the simulator but anyways…

Create a new VM in the vSphere Client and select Custom, assign a name to the VM, a resource group and select the datastore to place the VM files on.  Then you will be at the Virtual Machine Version screen.

Select Virtual Machine Version 7 and click Next

Select Other and choose FreeBSD 64bit from the drop down and click Next

Select 2 Virtual CPUs and click Next

Assign 2 GB RAM and click Next

Chose 4 NICs, in my case I placed the 1st and 3rd NIC on my VM network and the 2nd and 4th NIC on the Storage Network.  Click Next

Leave the default on SCSI controller and click Next

Select Do Not Create Disk and click Next

Click Finish

Now you need to copy the .vmdk files(including the cf card folder) from the ZIP into the directory you created the FreeBSD VM.  After you do that go into the VM properties and add hard disk choosing Use an Existing Virtual Disk. Browse to the VM location.

The first disk you want to add is the larger of the two with ‘cf’ in the name, after you add this disk add the other disk as well (I used default options for IDE controller etc).

That’s all there is to it, from this point you can follow the manual to setup the simulator.

After you power it on press ctrl-c and then select option 4.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Verify NetApp clusters with cf-config-check

A handy tool to use to verify the configuration of both NetApp controllers in a cluster is HA Configuration Checker.  This tool will check licenses, network configuration and options on each system to make sure there isn’t a problem during a cluster takeover.  Running the script is pretty simple, there is a .cgi and a .exe version.

By default it uses RSH to communicate to the NetApp controllers, personally I like to use SSH which just requires adding the -s into the command.  Another thing to be aware of, if you don’t specify the user when using SSH it will use the username you are currently signed in with on the computer it is being run from.  In my case that user doesn’t exist on the NetApp controllers so I used the root user.

Pretty helpful, and from this I can see I need to add a FlexClone license and fix my e0 interface or things depending on it may not work in a takeover situation.

NetApp System Manager can also do some basic alerting on issues like these as well, when I removed the FlexClone license from one of my filers you can see the on screen alert.

Bottom line: Make sure you don’t have mismatched configurations and when a cluster takeover happens you will be much happier.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Maximum LUN resize limits on NetApp

One thing to be aware of is there are limits to resizing a LUN, I’ve seen customers that will create a very small LUN thinking they can just grow that as big as they need to in the future. Due to the geometry of the LUN at the time it was created it can only be resized to a maximum of ~10 times the original size of the LUN.

One way to see this is at the command line, for the command to be available you need to run ‘priv set diag‘ and then you will have access to the ‘lun geometry‘ command. From there you can see the LUN size as well as the maximum LUN size that is available.

Here is a 10g LUN and I can see my maximum size available is 502gb, not exactly 10x but the reason for that is the lun geometry doesn’t change until you hit 50gb, so anything up to that point can be extended 10x the 50gb size.

Once I create a LUN of 51gb or larger the values for the SCSI geometry change and now my max resize is 1004gb, the 1004gb maximum is for lun sizes between 51g and 100g.

As you can see, the next change will come at a 101gb LUN, 101 to 150gb max resize is 1506gb

Here is a table of some of the results:

LUN Size Maximum Resize
< 50g 502g
51-100g 1004g
101-150g 1506g
151-200g 2008g
201-251g 2510g
252-301g 3012g
302-351g 3514g
352-401g 4016g

etc..

Popularity: 32% [?]

ONTAP 8.0 simulator now available

The NetApp NOW site has the ONTAP 8.0 simulator available, you can simulate both ONTAP 8.0 7-Mode and ONTAP 8.0 Cluster mode.

From the NOW site:
Simulate ONTAP 8.0 requirements
The following are the hardware and softwre requirements for using Simulate ONTAP 8.0 on a Windows or Mac system:

Hardware requirements
Dual core 64-bit Intel® or AMD architecture laptop or desktop
2 GB RAM for one instance of simulator
3 GB RAM for two instances of simulator (4 GB recommended)
20 GB free disk space per instance of simulator
VT support for Intel® based systems
Software requirements
For a Windows system
Microsoft Windows® XP
VMware® Server or VMware® Workstation or VMware® Player
For a Mac system
Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 or higher
VMware Fusion™ 2.03 or higher

Link

Popularity: 56% [?]

SnapManager 6.0 for Exchange Released

From NOW Site: SnapManager 6.0 for Microsoft Exchange introduces the following new capabilities:

  • Support for backup, restore, and verification for Microsoft Exchange 2010
  • SnapManager and Single Mailbox Recovery integration
  • Enhanced Exchange Business Continuance Module
  • Support for SnapDrive® 6.1 and SnapDrive® 6.2
  • Enhanced dataset and SnapVault integration

The functionality for dataset and SnapVault integration with SnapManager is available only if you are using Data ONTAP 7.3 RC2 or later. Obviously Exchange 2010 support is the biggest new feature although integrating SMBR into SME is a nice plus as well, will hopefully have a blog post with some screenshots of it soon.

Link to download (Requires NOW account)

Popularity: 30% [?]

Using Compression with SnapMirror transfers in ONTAP 7.3.2

One of the new features in Data ONTAP 7.3.2 is that you can now enable compression for your SnapMirror/SnapVault transfers.  This is great news for customers with limited bandwidth on their WAN links.  We have had customers in the past in this situation with SnapMirror transfers that would never finish and they had to look into WAN accelerators, nice to know that now there may be another option that in included free with ONTAP 7.3.2.  The compression is done on the controllers by using a standard gzip compression.

Obviously you need to be aware that enabling compression will add additional load onto your system but keep in mind you can use FlexShare to set lower priority to system level (e.g. SnapMirror) operations.  Another thing to keep in mind is that FlexShare is assigned per volume, so it doesn’t have to assign ALL of your SnapMirror transfers a low priority.

Enabling compression is as easy as modifying the /etc/snapmirror.conf file, you can enable compression on existing SnapMirror relationships.  The changes you need to make are as follows:

At the top of snapmirror.conf you need to establish a connection name and assign the source and destination filers to it.  For my example this will be:

sm1=multi(940-1,940-2)

<connection name>=multi(<sourcefiler>,<destinationfiler>)

Now you need to modify the existing line for the SnapMirror schedule, my example looks like this:

sm1:test_vol 940-2:test_vol_recv compression=enable – 10 * * *

Example:

For my example I was setting this up on a FAS940, I ran ‘sysstat –s 1’ before running the snapmirror and it averaged about 1% CPU usage

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

After kicking off the initial snapmirror transfer I re-ran the same command and it returned an average CPU usage of 72% on the destination and 100% on the source.

Source NetApp:

Destination NetApp:

So again if you have a busy system, you will need to decide if the decreased WAN traffic outweighs the added load on your system.  I kicked off a ‘snapmirror initialize’ and then monitored the transfer with ‘snapmirror status -l’ and saw that I was getting a steady 8:1 compression ratio on my transfer.

Popularity: 43% [?]

NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for vSphere

NetApp released v1.0 of their VSC for VMware vSphere, VSC is a plugin for vCenter which allows anyone connecting with the VI Client to access it.  What is nice about the tool is it allows you to see an overview of your storage environment and ensure things are configured inline with NetApp’s recommended best practices and, if they aren’t, allows you to set the recommended values.

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Click on the pictures for a larger view, you can see it adds a new tab called NetApp when the ESX server is selected.  In my environment we are using all NFS for storage to the ESX boxes, so in the next screen I show the ‘Storage Details – NAS’ option:

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What is nice about this view is I can quickly see I need to make a couple changes on the NetApp, the ucode settings should be set to on and the atime update should be set to on as well.

As mentioned before, there are also ESX specific settings that should be set to follow best practices, by right clicking on the ESX hosts listed in the NetApp tab (see 1st picture) there is an option to ‘Set Recommended Values’

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Finally you can also set guest timeout settings, under the Tools option there is a download link for the .iso for Windows and Linux guests.  For some reason in my environment I couldn’t download the ISO from this page – if you have the same issue you can find it in the Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\webapps\public folder.

Once you load the ISO in the VM, double clicking on the CD drive will ask you if you want to add the info in the windows_gos_timeout.reg file to the registry.

While I only have NFS mounted storage, you can also use the VSC to check things like:

  • Storage adapter timeout settings
  • Multipathing settings
  • Collecting diag info from fibre channel switches (or ESX hosts/NetApp controllers)

Also remember to check NetApp TR-3749 for best practices with NetApp and VMware vSphere.

Popularity: 23% [?]