Some newbie questions on Controllers, Nodes, object types and filtering out nodes

uptimenow — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 16:34:04 GMT

Hi,

I am just getting started with PowerShell in general and the NetApp PowerShell toolkit, and I have a couple of newbie questions.

From my first Powershell scripts, I understand that a Clustered ONTAP cluster is referred to as a "(Nc)Controller" and
the nodes as "(Nc)Node".

Given the following connection to a clustered ONTAP system:

$credentials = get-credential
$controller = Connect-NcController –Name na-test-cl1 -Credential $credentials -https

I am confused why these three actions work:

get-ncclusternode | get-ncdisk
get-ncnode | get-ncdisk
get-ncdisk -Controller $controller

while putting the clustername (without using a variablename) on the commandline like this doesn't work "as I would expect":

get-ncdisk -Controller na-test-cl1

Returns:

get-ncdisk : Incorrect credentials for na-test-cl1.
At line:1 char:1
+ get-ncdisk -Controller na-test-cl1
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (na-test-cl1:NcController) [Get-NcDisk], NaAuthException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ApiException,DataONTAP.C.PowerShell.SDK.Cmdlets.Disk.GetNcDisk

More specifically, I get from piping the output of get-ncclusternode and get-ncnode to Get-Member that
they return objects of types DataONTAP.C.Types.Cluster.ClusterNodeInfo and DataONTAP.C.Types.System.NodeDetailsInfo respectively.
$controller is of type NetApp.Ontapi.Filer.C.NcController

How/why does get-ncdisk figure out how to return disk information from three different object types, yet it doesn't understand a literal such as na-test-cl1 ?
So the values passed to "-Controller" and "-NodeName" must always be object instances ?

Lastly, I am trying to achieve the following:

I would like to go over a cluster's nodes and create an excel file per HA pair, containing the shelf info and disk info for that HA pair.
I want an excel file per HA pair in the cluster, not per node.

How do I go about filtering out the HA pair info ?

I can get the nodes in the cluster via:

$nodes = Get-NcclusterNode

And I can get a node's HA partner like this:

$partner = get-ncclusterhapartner -node $node

but what would be the recommended PowerShell way filter out partner nodes to avoid going over both nodes of an HA pair in a cluster when looking up the shelf & disk info ?

(I am coming from a Perl scripting background so I guess getting my head around an object based approach is what's going to be the biggest challenge).

Thanks in advance for answering one or two questions 🙂

Re: Some newbie questions on Controllers, Nodes, object types and filtering out nodes

maxxoverclocker — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:20:49 GMT

@uptimenowI know this probably wont help you, but maybe it will help someone else with the same question. I had the same thoughts regarding HA pairs and came up with this:

Get-NcNode | ForEach-Object {
[PSCustomObject]@{
Model = [String] $_.NodeModel
Nodes = @( $_.Node ) + @( ( Get-NcClusterHaPartner -Node $_.Node ).Partner ) | Sort-Object
}
} | Select-Object * -Unique

which will give you an object that lists the HA pairs:

Model Nodes
----- -----
FAS8040 {dc2-dot-01, dc2-dot-02}
FAS8200 {dc2-dot-03, dc2-dot-04}

Which you could then use to do something like this:

Get-NcNode | ForEach-Object {
[PSCustomObject]@{
Model = [String] $_.NodeModel
Nodes = @( $_.Node ) + @( ( Get-NcClusterHaPartner -Node $_.Node ).Partner ) | Sort-Object
}
} | Select-Object * -Unique | ForEach-Object {
$_.Nodes | Select-Object -First 1 | ForEach-Object {
Get-NcShelf -Node $_
}
}

Which will let you run commands against the first controller in the pair ordered alphabetically. But I would like to point out that you technically could have different configurations on each controller so you may actually want to run against both controllers in the pair regardless... I would recommend running against both controllers and then using Group-Object based on a commonality instead (ShelfID or similar).

topic Some newbie questions on Controllers, Nodes, object types and filtering out nodes in Microsoft Virtualization Discussions

Some newbie questions on Controllers, Nodes, object types and filtering out nodes

Re: Some newbie questions on Controllers, Nodes, object types and filtering out nodes