ONTAP Discussions
ONTAP Discussions
This is the next post in an ongoing series, tracking major issues with the System Manager GUI that began with 9.8. There were incremental improvements in 9.9.1 and 9.10.1. I've now upgraded to 9.11.1 and while there is one area of major improvement (Snapmirror job creation) - it still isn't fully back to pre-9.8 functionality and thus I still can't use the GUI. This is a list of issues I still have with 9.11.1, most of which are unchanged from 9.9.1. Starting to think this is a lost cause when so few fixes have been added in four versions, but at least there are a few and maybe there will be more.
Several months ago, I spent days rewriting all of our documentation to instruct fellow admins to use the command line rather than the GUI to perform basic tasks, and unfortunately that still needs to be the case at this point.
Solved! See The Solution
Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. Here is a list of how we are addressing your concerns.
The following features were introduced / reintroduced in 9.12.1:
• Volume percent full - The column selections are now preserved.
• Volume resize - Auto size amount.
• Subnets - The ability to manage this was reintroduced in System Manager in 9.12.1
• LUN creation wizard - Name prefix is now called just ‘name’.
• You only get the full text of an event when you point to it, in a tool-tip format. - You can now view the full text of an event by expanding it.
• Plus many more More to come in the next version of ONTAP!
Other comments:
• SnapMirror job creation - Destination volume is a mirror of the source in terms of size, autosize and snapshot %. As source volume grows so will the destination on update.
• Efficiency details - Showing the compression/deduplication job status is not planned for System Manager
• Efficiency policies - AFF Systems - Storage efficiencies are managed automatically for AFF systems except the option to turn on temperature sensitive storage efficiency (TSSE).
• Creating volumes in SAN SVM - This is by design. What are you looking to control here? The name of the LUNs?
• LUN ID display in initiator group - This is acknowledged, and we will target a later release.
• LUN creation Wizard - Initiator group. Under More options choose “Host Initiators” to create a new initiator group
• LUN creation wizard - Auto size/autodelete options - Some less used options have been left out in the create workflow by design to keep the workflow simple.
• LUN creation wizard - Enable SnapMirror - Under more options, this is fixed in 9.11.1 and backported to previous releases as well. Custom policies are now available in SM. The policies are shown only after the destination SVM selection for performance reasons.
Potentially Open Support Case:
• Event Log - Warnings should get cleared after 24 hours. If not happening for a particular warning, then a support case should be created.
Again, Thank you for your feedback, we appreciate it and will continue to make the experience better!
Tim Gautreau - Manageability TME
I'm afraid I don't know what that means.
One addendum I forgot to add above. A new Resize option was added in (I think) 9.10.1 but we don't use it because...
Volume Resize - this option doesn't allow you to reset the autosize limit. We use autogrow on every volume so this means I have to tell admins not to use the resize option to resize a volume, but rather to use the Edit option, and then manually calculate the autosize increase.
Thanks for taking the time to share your specific and well explained constructive feedback.
We've shared it with the folks from the product management team so they are aware.
Thanks again for contributing to this community and sharing your experience.
Thanks @RossC ! I mentioned to someone else that I prefer to focus on the positives 🙂 - NetApp has great products ... they are extremely resilient ... I was just frustrated by the lost productivity in administering them due to the change in the GUI. Hopefully things can continue to improve. I should probably do a similar post for SnapCenter to spotlight about 10 issues I've been tracking for 4 versions now...
Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. Here is a list of how we are addressing your concerns.
The following features were introduced / reintroduced in 9.12.1:
• Volume percent full - The column selections are now preserved.
• Volume resize - Auto size amount.
• Subnets - The ability to manage this was reintroduced in System Manager in 9.12.1
• LUN creation wizard - Name prefix is now called just ‘name’.
• You only get the full text of an event when you point to it, in a tool-tip format. - You can now view the full text of an event by expanding it.
• Plus many more More to come in the next version of ONTAP!
Other comments:
• SnapMirror job creation - Destination volume is a mirror of the source in terms of size, autosize and snapshot %. As source volume grows so will the destination on update.
• Efficiency details - Showing the compression/deduplication job status is not planned for System Manager
• Efficiency policies - AFF Systems - Storage efficiencies are managed automatically for AFF systems except the option to turn on temperature sensitive storage efficiency (TSSE).
• Creating volumes in SAN SVM - This is by design. What are you looking to control here? The name of the LUNs?
• LUN ID display in initiator group - This is acknowledged, and we will target a later release.
• LUN creation Wizard - Initiator group. Under More options choose “Host Initiators” to create a new initiator group
• LUN creation wizard - Auto size/autodelete options - Some less used options have been left out in the create workflow by design to keep the workflow simple.
• LUN creation wizard - Enable SnapMirror - Under more options, this is fixed in 9.11.1 and backported to previous releases as well. Custom policies are now available in SM. The policies are shown only after the destination SVM selection for performance reasons.
Potentially Open Support Case:
• Event Log - Warnings should get cleared after 24 hours. If not happening for a particular warning, then a support case should be created.
Again, Thank you for your feedback, we appreciate it and will continue to make the experience better!
Tim Gautreau - Manageability TME
Wow, thank you Tim! That is great to see that some of these issues are being resolved in 9.12.1. We will likely upgrade sometime this summer (we usually wait for several patches first). I have comments / questions on several of your points:
Thanks again for taking the time to outline a detailed reply. It is great to know some of these are getting resolved!
As a supplement to all of the 9.12 updates mentioned above, I think it's relevant to share the YouTube link to the NetApp ONAIR live-stream covering the updates that made it into the release. This episode is a popular one!
👉 ONTAP 9.12 Updates with Keith Aasen | NetApp ONAIR 👈
Nice, thank you @Drew_C ! Look forward to watching that.
@gautreau , thank you again for the tip on SnapMirror changes. You had said "Destination volume is a mirror of the source in terms of size, autosize and snapshot %. As source volume grows so will the destination on update." I finally got around to testing this today with the simulator as my snapmirror destination. I found this to be partly but not totally correct. I may be doing something "wrong" in the GUI. The destination volume that was created did in fact have the same autosize (grow only) and snapshot % (0) settings as the source. However, the volume size did not match. I've noticed that over the past few years, if you use the GUI the destination volume isn't the same as the source - it's sized to be just slightly more than the amount of data in the volume. Any ideas?