topic Re: Pre-production checklist in ONTAP Discussions

Pre-production checklist

TimJMcCuen — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:23:12 GMT

Hello,

Does anyone have any recommendations of things I should check before my NetApp cluster goes into production? I am going to upgrade to ontap 9.7p12. I have a 4 node cluster running mostly NFS but have a few CIF shares.

I have done the following to prepare for going into production:

Looked through logs / events for errors
Run the "system health" commands
Tested failover and giveback between nodes
Tested restoring from snapshots
Implemented most 9as my environment will allow) of the changes listed in the NetApp Hardening Guide.

If you have a recommendation of something else I should look at / test please let me know and thanks for your help.

Re: Pre-production checklist

SpindleNinja — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 23:09:45 GMT

Run Config Advisor (or have your partner do it).

Depends how far you want to go - You can also simulate -

Port failure (unplug a port in a ifgrp or the whole ifgrp).

Cluster switch failure - Power off one

Node failure

Re: Pre-production checklist

ttran — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 04:58:42 GMT

Hello @TimJMcCuen,

The following KB goes into detail all the various checks you can perform: How to perform system health checks in ONTAP.

Regards,

Team NetApp

Re: Pre-production checklist

paul_stejskal — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 14:19:21 GMT

If you're using CIFS for VDI/home directories, please ensure you set up dynamic home dirs: https://kb.netapp.com/Advice_and_Troubleshooting/Data_Storage_Software/ONTAP_OS/Troubleshooting_CIFS_Latency_-_Single_volume_readdir_workloads_with_high_latency

Do you have performance monitoring set up? (Perf TSE here!) If not AIQUM would be good.

Look at your risks in AIQ as well, and update anything that is incorrect.

Make sure you test your production workloads to make sure everything works.

Failover test and LIF failure test (yank the cable - not literally of course).

Re: Pre-production checklist

paul_stejskal — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 14:20:48 GMT

Yank a disk shelf cable to make sure you still have redundancy?

Re: Pre-production checklist

TimJMcCuen — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 23:47:39 GMT

Thank you all for the wonderful tips