ONTAP Select - Bypass minimum storage requirement

[BenHuntsman]

Hi there!

   I'm setting up ONTAP Select 9.2 in my lab, where we have limited hardware.  I've got a two-node VMware cluster with each node having 1.6TB of local storage.  The rest is SAN-based.  Unfortunately, I can't quite stretch the hardware enough to get 2+TB of local storage to meet the minimum size requirement.

   I'd never even think about doing this in production, but given that this is a lab only and we just need it for demo/learning purposes, is there any way to manually bypass the minimum size requirement of 2TB, and/or make it use thin provisioning?  I'm ok with deploying entirely from the command line, but I really need a way to get this working without buying a bunch of bigger disks...

Thanks!

[JohnChampion]

You could try the Product Eval version - it might let you squeeze in a single node  --  https://mysupport.netapp.com/NOW/download/special/ontapselect_eval/

There won't be a DeployVM using the product eval OVA howerver.

FYI - 9.3RC1 was released on 9 November 🙂 

[JohnChampion]

Also, Select supports external storage (you mentioned SAN) - you just have to set a capacity limit.

[SeanHatfield]

I've been deploying it to nested hosts.  Its obviously not a supported configuration, but I've built nested lab pods with 1, 2, and 4 node ESX environments.  I allocate 24gb ram, 6vcpu, and a 3TB disk to each nested ESX host.  I thin provision them on an NFS datastore, which doesn't have anywhere near 12T of actual capacity.  I'm not filling it up or expecting real-world performance, just running through deployment scenarios and doing some basic functional testing.  In my case, it's working out fine, but YMMV.