An aggregate can only run on a single controller so I'll want to have at least two (one for each controller). The size limit appears to be 16GB. On the first controller I was planning on running all 24 600GB drives in a single aggregate to run our primary ESXi environment and Exchange systems. How would one configure these disks as a general rule? Using RAID-DP? Assuming that, one HS and I have an odd number of disks (23). Is one HS enough?
Look at the Sytem Configuration Guide for 3140. Depending on ONTAP version you want to run, the aggr/vol limits are different. If you go with 8.0.2, then you can have 64-bit aggregates and make them larger - 50TB, IIRC. The link to SysConfig Guide is http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/hardware/NetApp/syscfg/scdot802/index.htm
I wouldn't do anything other than RAID-DP.
NetApp allows you to run with 1 Hot Spare per controller. If you enable "disk maintenance center", you'll need two hot spares. That'll allow NetApp to proactively copy out blocks from disks that are going suspect and allow you to switch out drives. Some reading here on these topics
http://partners.netapp.com/go/techontap/matl/storage_resiliency.html
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3437.pdf
http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3786.html
http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/bpg/ontap_plat_stor/data_avail.shtml
I've been reading up on using NFS instead of FC. I already have an entire FC environment with (I think) plenty of ports. The major point I've seen on running NFS is that dedupe will "release" the space available to ESX when doing it via NFS but not in a VMFS/FC environment. If the block level dedupe runs against VMFS volumes, where does the free space show up - or does it show up at all? Would you thin provision the VMFS LUNs and the space returned from the dedupe process? I have 8Gbit FC running so 10Gbit ethernet probably would make too much difference on transport performance.
Depending on the application, you would be using either iSCSI or NFS. For SME (SnapManager for Exchange), it does have the ability to manage thin provisioning etc. Not sure how much you would get out from de-dup. More discussion is probably in the offing.
I was planning on running CIFS on the other controller with the 2TB drives. If I'm reading things correctly, there is a 16TB limit for an aggregate so I'll need multiple aggregates, right? Are HS's assigned to an aggregate? I was also planning on running some test/low IO required VMs on SATA (I'm doing that now on the CX4 with R4+1 groups without any problems). Nearly all of the NAS data on our current systems are running on SATA drives and performs adequately. It seems to me with 2TB drives that you hit the 16TB limit with just 8 disks...two 10 disk RAID-DP sets, a hot spare, and I've got 3 disks that I'm not sure what to do with.
Again, look at the links above to get some insight and recommendations on hot spares, aggregate sizing etc.
Currently we run two distinct AD domains that don't interact with eachother. Currently I have 3 CIFS servers in one domain and the data is grouped in "failover" units, i.e., I can move a business function to the remote site without having to move the whole thing. The other domain has a single CIFS server with 3TB of data that is 99% of the time read-only. Is it possible to replicate this setup or is it time to rethink things during the migration?
Multiple domains are possible using MultiStore (vfiler functionality)
We only use one CIFS server "by name" and everything else is presented via DFS. On the one, I'll have to do a hard-cut on the name - there are only about 5 shares referenced by name but how easy is it to rename the CIFS server?
If that file server is not doing anything else and that name can be taken away from it, then you can transfer that name to the NetApp system using the netbios aliases feature.
Another question about dedupe...is this at the aggregate level? One of the issues on the Celerra (of many) is that the dedupe does not cross filesystem boundaries. The Celerra has been able to dedupe/compress about 20% of the data. I know it isn't apples to apples but as far as raw storgae for comparison I'm doubling in size and on the original system I have about 5TB that isn't even allocated to anything.
De-Dupe is at volume level.
HTH - I'll let others chime in with more info/direction.
rajeev