When upgrading a NetApp filer from a pre-7.3 release to 7.3, metadata is apparently moved from within the FlexVol into the containing aggregate. If your aggregate is tight on space – more than 96% full – NetApp requires that you complete extra verification steps to ensure that you can complete the upgrade. From the Data ONTAP® 7.3.1.1 Release Notes (NOW login required):
If you suspect that your system has almost used all of its free space, or if you use thin provisioning, you should check the amount of space in use by each aggregate. If any aggregate is 97 percent full or more, do not proceed with the upgrade until you have used the Upgrade Advisor or aggrSpaceCheck tools to determine your system capacity and plan your upgrade.
Upgrade Advisor is a great tool, and I heartily recommend you use it for your upgrade. However, it doesn’t give you a lot of visibility into what’s being checked for here. Lucky for us, NetApp offers an alternative tool: aggrSpaceCheck (NOW login required). More…
My NetApp FAS 2020 Sizing post remains popular nearly a year after I wrote it. However, with ONTAP 7.3.1 (and later releases) out, it’s also out of date. Here’s current information from p. 33 of the ONTAP 7.3.1.1 release notes (NOW login required):
Beginning with Data ONTAP 7.3.1, FAS2020 systems support aggregates up to 16 TB raw capacity,
provided that the root volume is hosted in a dedicated aggregate (that is, one that contains only the root
volume and no user data).
The release notes go on to point out an alternative to the dedicated root aggregate – having two spare disks per controller.
It’s nice to see the FAS2020 finally getting a maximum aggregate size on par with the rest of NetApp’s product line. However, in an era where 2TB drives are available from Western Digital – and presumably other manufacturers before too long – ONTAP’s 16TB aggregate limit grows increasingly anachronistic.
Update: NetApp has a KB article in NOW addressing this: Using SnapVault to Archive SnapManager for Exchange Backups Sets. Bottom line: You do not necessarily need ONTAP 7.3, Protection Manager and DataFabric Manager to send SnapManager for Exchange snapshots to a SnapVault secondary.
We recently acquired SnapManager for Exchange (SME) at my place of employment. We have an existing NetApp deployment consisting of two primary filers in a SnapVault arrangement with a third filer. The SME install is part of an upgrade from Exchange 2003 (on DAS) to 2007 (on Fibre Channel storage).
What we missed prior to purchasing SME: If you want to use SnapVault with SME, you need two additional pieces of software: Protection Manager and NetApp Management Console (part of DataFabric Manager, apparently). Here’s what p. 408 of the SnapManager® 5.0 for Microsoft® Exchange Installation and Administration Guide (NOW login required) says:
The following are the software dependencies for integrating SnapManager with
data set and SnapVault:
◆ Protection Manager 3.7 and later
◆ NetApp Management Console 3.7 and later
◆ SnapDrive for Windows 6.0 and later
◆ Data ONTAP 7.3 or later
Wish I’d known that sooner.
(This is the point where some random NetApp fanboy pops down to the comments and fires off something about how NetApp is the greatest storage company ever, and if I’d done appropriate due diligence, I wouldn’t have missed this requirement. My advice: Spare us, smart guy. I’m writing this post to make it easier for other NetApp customers to do their “due diligence”.)
There have been a few posts elsewhere discussing file-level recovery for Linux VMs on NetApp NFS datastores, but none that have dealt specifically with Linux LVM-encapsulated partitions.
Here’s our in-house procedure for recovery; note that we do not have FlexClone licensed on our filers. More…
I see echoes of Toyota teaching its Toyota Production System in Google’s recent release of information about their data centers. Relatively straightforward concepts – the challenge is in adapting your existing systems to them.
(This post adds only a couple small details to work described at randys.org and cenolan.com – go there for background on this post and useful scripts for automated Duplicity backup to S3.)
First off, if you want to use Duplicity installed from FreeBSD Ports to backup to Amazon S3, be sure to also install the devel/py-boto and security/pinentry-curses ports.
If you attempt to run the backup script described at randys.org or cenolan.com from cron, you may run into an error similar to the following: More…
After writing the second post, I thought the issue was pretty much resolved: From multiple sources, the consensus seemed to be that running ESX with VM swap on NFS would be fine. Imagine my surprise (and disappointment) at seeing the following VMware KB article 1008091, updated yesterday: An ESX virtual machine on NFS fails with swap errors. Further details are in the article itself, but VMware’s KB site is throwing intermittent errors for me at the moment, so I’ll provide the money quote:
The reliability of the virtual machine can be improved by relocating the swap file location to a non-NFS datastore. Either SAN or local storage datastores improve virtual machine stability.
In case you’re curious/adventurous/broke enough to try configuring your VMotion network on Fast Ethernet instead of Gigabit Ethernet, here’s what you can expect.
First, a warning from your VI client that you’re venturing into unsupported territory:
A friendly warning
And then, if you go ahead with the VMotion, a slight pause on the VM in question. The following is output from running while true; do date; sleep 1; done on a Linux guest during the VMotion:
Tue Feb 3 13:23:17 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:23:18 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:23:19 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:23:20 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:23:21 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:23:22 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:24:12 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:24:13 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:24:14 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:24:15 PST 2009
Tue Feb 3 13:24:16 PST 2009
Note the fifty second pause between 13:23:22 and 13:24:12? Ouch…
As a sysadmin that supports multiple R users, a post late last year on InsideHPC drew my attention – Parallel framework for statistical analysis package “R”. The creators of the Simple Parallel R INTerface have “designed and built a prototype framework that allows the addition of parallelised functions to R to enable the easy exploitation of HPC systems.” (paper, source code) In other words, a system that lets R users run on a cluster without learning parallel programming. More…
Apparently, disk arrays are sensitive sorts that respond poorly when yelled at:
Makes me wonder how much engineering that I never thought about goes into designing disk shelves to keep drives insulated from vibrations. The Fishworks analytics interface is dazzling – wish I had that yesterday when I was looking at a possible Exchange I/O performance issue with perfmon…
