Hi Nigel,
The upcoming release of OCUM is supported on non VMware environments as well, like RHEL stand alone isntaller.
Now before I answer, its good to understand what are the advantages of having a datasources in WFA.
The power of WFA comes from its decision making or resource selection logic on which resource needs to be selected in order to create/delete/migrate a volume/SVM etc.
In order to do that WFA needs data about the complete NetApp Datacenter to understand and make intelligent selection based on attributes like inventory,capacity and performance data.
So you can either use them in isolation or in combination before creating a volume or SVM.
Like if you want to create SVM that will server CIFS data then, the cluster on which you create should be licensed for cifs and the service should be up and running.
This kind of selection can be done using finder/filters in WFA which in turn uses the Datasource information cached in WFA MySQL database.
Similarly, if you want to create a volume on a SVM, you need to choose an aggr. The WFA datasource cache can help you in not just selecting an aggr that has enough space for the volume to be created, but also to make sure in choosing the one which has sufficient days or even years before its full. So that you need not keep moving the volume from this aggr. Also it can help you choose not just based on size, type and growth characteristics of the aggr but also performance.
So if you dont want any of these, then you can make all the resource selection logic in WFA as User Inputs and still make the workflows run.
Regards
adai
