9.12 LUN creation

[DWhitlow]

I recently upgraded to 9.12 after we replace an old spinning disk 2552 with a C250. That came with a bunch of GUI changes I'm still trying to get used to. One thing that I'm struggling with is creating new LUNs or Volumes. In the previous version I could select the tier (used to be called aggregates) the volume gets created on but in 9.12 there is no option... it only seems to want to put it on the older tiers (meaning the ones I had before). Also, previously I could create a new LUN and specify what volume I wanted it on. Not in the new GUI. If I try and create a new LUN, it creates the volume and gives it the same name as the LUN.

I was able to fumble my way through and accomplish what I want by going through the CLI, but that is a bit onerous as I'm not in there enough to actually have a great grasp on the commands. 

Did NetApp hire a bunch of Unix guys that think "CLI OR DIE!"? (I say that half joking as I used to work with some Unix guys that felt if you didn't use CLI you weren't a computer person).

[chamfer]

Hi @DWhitlow,

I feel your pain, I really do.  The move to the new GUI on ONTAP has been a slow and arduous journey (started in ONTAP 9.7 from memory) and the new System Manager GUI has no-where the feature set of the classic GUI.

Unfortunately even in ONTAP 9.16.1 you cannot using the GUI to create a LUN and place it on a volume that you want other than the "Group with related LUNs" feature where "The LUNs will be grouped together with related LUNs on an existing volume on the storage VM."  This means you need to know an existing LUN name when creating a new LUN.  Details here https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/task_admin_add_luns.html

Creating a volume per LUN is generic "best practice", but then you need to be aware of scaling figures and the like (e.g. maximum volumes per array/cluster)..... so I understand why it is the default.

To be honest the best way to move forward is the CLI, sadly, and you should just save your commands and build it out into a template when you need to add new volumes and/or LUNs.

Why did NetApp simplify its GUI?  In my opinion it would be due to the pressure of competitors that have simple GUIs that abstract away the underlying storage so general system administrators are able to maintain a NetApp vs dedicated storage engineers.  NetApp was losing market share as they were too complex, too many "nerd knobs" when people just want it to be simple, fast, and keep out of the way and provide storage to their applications........ Well my opinion anyway.

[HUX20002000]

I've been in those shoes so I know exactly what you mean. Why NetApp decided to do it this way I just don't know.

My solution was to script it in PowerShell. (The "NetApp.ONTAP" module is excellent.) My script creates the volume, with the various snapshot and storage efficiency settings I want, then creates a LUN of equal size, with the same name. The only parameters I need to give it are name, size and destination aggregate. (I also attempted to have it automatically map to a host intiator group, based on a LUN ID parameter, but that caused a rather spectactular PDL issue, so I nixed that part!)