WFA server - Windows 2012 vs. RHEL7?

[mbrownie1]

Hey Folks,

Has anyone run into any issues or limitations of running Netapp WFA on RHEL instead of Windows?  We are using Powershell as our scripting language for most of our customized workflows and were wondering if that would have issues (or be missing cmdlets such as the Netapp Powershell toolkit) when running from a RHEL server?  Thoughts, insight?

Thanks - Matt

[MattInCO · Accepted solution]

@mbrownie1

I think the main limitation with WFA + RHEL is you won’t be able to use PowerShell at all. I double checked the IMT and this is one of the call outs for information with RHEL:

8036:For OnCommand Workflow Automation (WFA) installed on Linux, certified content from Data ONTAP operating in 7-Mode is currently not available. Commands that have only PowerShell implementations are not compatible with Linux. Certified commands for 7-Mode and VMware are currently not ported to Perl and are therefore not compatible with Linux.

I use Windows 2012R2 for our WFA instance, since it can do both PowerShell and PERL. Hopefully someone will let me know if I am incorrect on this point.

[sundarea]

@MattInCO You are right about the limitation. 

@mbrownie1if you want only perl then go for linux, Also performance is better in perl compare to powershell. 

[sinhaa]

@mbrownie1

Matt,

Powershell support on Linux I believe is still in Beta stage from Microsoft side. As far as I know its only supported on some Linux flavours and RHEL is not in that list.

Even if it had been, WFA has not yet confirmed that the WFA Powershell commands can run on Linux. It may work, it may not. We have NOT added this into our support matrix.

WFA lInux will NOT have NetApp powershell toolkit. But you can download it and place in WFA Posh Modules dir to pick it up. But again how will it work, I can't answer that right now.

You said you have been using Powershell as your scripting language. So you have been on windows all this while.  Why are you looking for switch over to linux?

sinhaa

[mbrownie1]

Our CI-CD pipeline for development uses GIT, Chef, Jenkins, Kafka, Telegraf, InfluxDB, etc... It is mostly Linux based and Open Source which doesn't play nice when you have your Automation orchestrator running on a Windows VM in the middle of it.  Of well, we will just have to find workarounds for now since I don't think we have an appetite to rewrite all the Powershell in Perl anytime soon.  Thanks for the info - Matt