OnTAP Tools - No Storage Creds Needed?

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

I just deployed OnTAP Tools 10.4 after having used 9.x and prior versions for years. We only use it for one purpose - making sure recommended values are set on ESXi hosts. During setup I created a link to vCenter and it discovered the ESXi hosts, listing their status [all green for hosts with NetApp storage, as expected].

My question: since I don't need anything else, is there any need to have a local OnTAP account for OnTAP Tools? Will it continue to discover changes to the ESXi hosts and not attempt to discover storage? Right now the entire tool is blank - no storage backends, datastores, VMs, etc. -- just the "ESXi Host Compliance" section which is all I need. Any suggestions? I tend to think I'm 'done' but want to be sure OTT will at least keep ESXi host info up to date.

[ChanceBingen · Accepted solution]

I don't think so. If you aren't doing any storage management tasks, you don't need to onboard the storage, so you shouldn't need an account.

Is there a specific reason why you aren't using it for storage management or observability? The small GUI widgets that display storage-side details of the datastores are quite useful.

[TMADOCTHOMAS]

Thanks @ChanceBingen ! So we have one VMware admin who doesn't look at storage much, and I'm the NetApp admin who primarily use NetApp tools {AIUM, OnTAP, etc) to keep up with storage information. So although I use vCenter, seeing storage info in vCenter is redundant for me in general.

I haven't seen the 10.x console version so maybe it's different enough that I might find it useful. In 9.x there were constant storage discovery jobs and I entered behind-the-scenes settings to prevent it. It would always discover non-NetApp systems that cluttered the screen and I eventually used settings to stop them from showing up. It was a lot of work for a tool we only used for one reason. This seems much easier! Thanks again.