Pre-production checklist

[TimJMcCuen]

Hello,

Does anyone have any recommendations of things I should check before my NetApp cluster goes into production?   I am going to upgrade to ontap 9.7p12.  I have a 4 node cluster running mostly NFS but have a few CIF shares.

I have done the following to prepare for going into production:

• Looked through logs / events for errors
• Run the "system health" commands
• Tested failover and giveback between nodes
• Tested restoring from snapshots
• Implemented most 9as my environment will allow) of the changes listed in the NetApp Hardening Guide.

If you have a recommendation of something else I should look at / test please let me know and thanks for your help.

[SpindleNinja]

Run Config Advisor (or have your partner do it).  

Depends how far you want to go - You can also simulate - 

Port failure (unplug a port in a ifgrp or the whole ifgrp). 

Cluster switch failure - Power off one 

Node failure 

[ttran · Accepted solution]

Hello @TimJMcCuen,

The following KB goes into detail all the various checks you can perform: How to perform system health checks in ONTAP.

Regards,

Team NetApp

[paul_stejskal]

If you're using CIFS for VDI/home directories, please ensure you set up dynamic home dirs: https://kb.netapp.com/Advice_and_Troubleshooting/Data_Storage_Software/ONTAP_OS/Troubleshooting_CIFS_Latency_-_Single_volume_readdir_workloads_with_hi...

Do you have performance monitoring set up? (Perf TSE here!) If not AIQUM would be good.

Look at your risks in AIQ as well, and update anything that is incorrect.

Make sure you test your production workloads to make sure everything works.

Failover test and LIF failure test (yank the cable - not literally of course).

[paul_stejskal]

Yank a disk shelf cable to make sure you still have redundancy?

[TimJMcCuen]

Thank you all for the wonderful tips