Wednesday, October 28, 2009

BIG Update to NetApp Setup Cheat Sheet

I spent a lot of time yesterday updating my NetApp Setup Cheat Sheet.  Check it out if you are interested in NetApp configuration from either FilerView or the command line.  I have documented and tested everything with ONTAP 7.3.1.  I will be updating the document more over the next couple of weeks as I study for my NetApp certification tests.

7 comments:

Andrew Miler said...

Just curious -- what NetApp tests are you working on?

Aaron Delp said...

Hey Andrew - I'm going to run the certification gauntlet next week at NetApp Insight in AZ. I plan to take both exams for the NCDA and the NCIE-SAN Exam as well. Not sure how I'll do because I really haven't had time to study but you never know!

Andrew Miler said...

Cool.....sounds like you've been busy since class.

I knocked out the NCDA classes within a month or so....need to do the NCIE-SAN b/4 the end of the year (as well as refresh my VCP actually).

Aaron Delp said...

Congrats on passing!

It has been crazy busy! Not sure if that is a good thing anymore! :)

I have to do VCP as well! Gonna be a busy year...

Are you heading to Insight? It would be good to catch up if you are.

Thanks!

Andrew Miler said...

I hear you on crazy busy....more than enough to do. For the VCP, do check out the "retake for free if fail the first time" offer. I actually got my coupon code for that last week...just a nice safety net.

And no, I'm afraid I won't be at Insight....I'd probably be going this year if not for my wife and I expecting twins to arrive sometime between now and Monday (no joke ;-)...so I figured probably not a good time to head out of state. ;-)

Unknown said...

Hi Aaron-
Thanks for explaining your change to the aggr0 snap reserve. I remember your cheat sheet stating to set it to 0% at one point. I've asked my NetApp SE what he thought about 0% snap reserve. He stated that, off the record, it should be ok to leave at 0% since he couldn't remember hearing of a case where an agg snap was needed by support. I suggested my thinking was to just turn it on before ONTAP upgrades or major config changes which he thought sounded fair. I appreciate your notes regarding this and will consider bumping it back up. Care to elaborate on the issues you've seen when set to 0%?

Also noticed you've bumped the vol0 size from 10g to 15g on 2000 series.

Couple thoughts regarding lun setup, if using SnapDrive. Since it's best practice to create the lun within SnapDrive instead of cli, it can get a little tricky to carve a thin provisioned lun as SD forces the lun reservation setting to be enabled. The easiest permanent workaround is to wrfile a file named sdparams.conf in the volume where the lun will go with 1 line of text:
'space_reservation_new_lun = off'
Any luns created in that vol will have lun reservation disabled.

Source: Section 7.3 --
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3483.pdf

The TR mentions to have no spaces in the line of text. In my setup, I found the opposite to be true. I needed to have a space before and after the '=' sign.

Also, Section 7.4 of the same TR has good configs for thin provisioning. I have used and like the 2nd config.

Thanks for all the great info Aaron. Most definitely keep the NetApp, VMware, and IBM tips coming!

Aaron Delp said...

@Andrew - Twins! That is awesome! I'm sure you will be VERY busy next week! Congratulations!

Leif - Thank you for the comments. The 0% at the aggr conversation actually came from a class that Andrew and I were in with somebody really good at NetApp Support. My changing my thinking came from him.

I haven't seen any issues setting it to 0% but the support guy told us that he likes to have at lease a very small one (2-3%) because there are very extreme situations where the aggr level snap can actually save you from data loss. I took that recommendation combined with needing 3% free in the aggr for ONTAP 7.2 -> 7.3 upgrades and made it 3%.

I did bump up the minimum for the 2020. I read it somewhere, can't remember where right now, sorry about that!

I will take a look at the TR and SnapDrive settings "soon". I have a long list I'm keeping of things I need to test and it is on the list. Thanks for the information!!