thinking sysadmin

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).
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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 However, with ONTAP 7.3.1 (and later releases) out, it’s also out of date.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.
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