thinking sysadmin

1. Create a Fibre Channel LUN on your NetApp and map it to your NexentaStor machine (I’m using version 3.0.2 in this example). For this example, I’ve created a 10GB LUN on a filer running ONTAP 7.2:

   netapp01> lun show /vol/nexenta01/lun01/lun
           /vol/nexenta01/lun01/lun      10g (10737418240)   (r/w, online, mapped)
   

   There are eight paths from our NetApp to our NexentaStor appliance, so the LUN appears eight times on the “qlc” adapter (lines 9-16 below):

   nmc@nexenta01:/$ lunsync
   Cleanup obsolete (dangling) device links?  Yes
   Re-enumerating LUNs... done.
   
   nmc@nexenta01:/$ show lun
   LUN ID      Device    Type         Size       Volume     Mounted Attach GUID
   c0t0d0      sd0       disk         272.3GB    syspool    no      mega_sas 60024e805102c100118a3fa70ae8937a
   c1t0d0      sd128     cdrom        No Media              no      ata    -
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd6       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd4       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd7       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c2t5*DDDd0  sd5       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd3       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd2       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd8       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   c3t5*DDDd0  sd1       disk         10GB                  no      qlc    60a98000486e542f5034577076716469
   syspo~/swap           zvol         1.0GB      syspool    no
   

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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”.)

(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:
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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…

I was checking out VMware’s new online search-able HCL and I noticed that the new Sun Unified Storage Systems were on the HCL. That was fast – and now I’m really curious as to how the systems with flash drives perform as storage for ESX.

Quick notes on configuring LDAP in Fishworks, gleaned from my experience working with the VMware simulator:

As I noted in my “quick walk” post’s comments, I had difficulty getting LDAP working initially on my corporate Active Directory network. The crux for me turned out to be getting the LDAP Schema Definitions correct. Here are the settings that worked correctly for me, authenticating against an AD instance with the schema extended by Microsoft’s Services for Unix add-on (other LDAP schemata will, of course, need different mappings):

USERS
Search descriptor: Don’t leave this blank – according to the Fishworks documentation this “sets the LDAP search descriptor, attribute mappings and object class mappings for users and groups. By default, the search descriptor for users is ou=people,dc=example,dc=com, and for groups is ou=group,dc=example,dc=com” – so what you enter will be site-specific.

Attribute mappings:

• uid=msSFU30Name
• uidNumber=msSFU30UidNumber
• gidNumber=msSFU30GidNumber

Object class mappings:

• posixAccount=User

GROUPS
Search descriptor: Again, don’t leave this blank – enter the appropriate value for your site.

Attribute mappings:

• gidNumber=msSFU30GidNumber
• uniqueMember=msSFU30PosixMember

Object class mappings:

• posixGroup=group

How did I know that the schema definition mappings were the problem? The logs gave it away: Maintenance -> Logs -> System, where I saw messages similar to the following: “libsldap: Status: 0 Mesg: Unable to set value: schema map already existed for ‘User’.”

How did I know that I had the schema definitions working? Share settings that I had created using numeric UIDs and GIDs automatically became mapped to the correct user and group names.

I’ll update this post if I find additional configuration that may be necessary.

(In the spirit of Joerg Moellenkamp’s thought experiments:)

That virtualized Fishworks appliance got me thinking: What if you combined this with this? Yeah, managing Elastic Block Store devices would require some changes, but, if you needed a NAS for your EC2 instances…

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

That was easy...

Below is a quick walkthrough of my experience booting and installing the Fishworks VMware appliance; my thoughts follow.
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