FAS 2040 Random Questions (of Panic)

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I was tasked with a very simple NetAPP FAS2040 (no shelves) installation which only includes a power-up and controller initialization but have some questions which i can seem to find any concrete answears:

1. I am suppose to just get the system running and then hand it over to another overseas IT team so I went ahead it configured one port on each controller with a fixed IP for OnCommand. However I see those ports are the same that could be used for iSCSI traffic (but I would not know that as we have not given any more details on what is going to be done with the unit). Now the e0P port is called the Shelf ACP port which has got a IP address configured after I ran the initial Ontap configuration - but what excactly is it being used for? Would it be okay to configure one port of each controller card as the management port for general administration and can this be changed easily later on?

2. The unit is fully populated with 600GB drives and I know for a fact that the technical guys are going to be wondering why aggr0 is using three of those disk and they cannot use it - if I would have done the hard drive specing I would have used smaller ones for the first three disk to be used by the NetApp OS. Is there any safe way to modify this or should I not ticker around with this disk config?

3. Is there a NetAPP technical documentation template system implementars can use or is this left to the implementors own creativity? I was looking for something that highlights all the core configuration which i can fill in with the relevant details.

4. The current OS is DATA Ontap 8.0.1, should I upgrade and where can I find upgrade instructions?

5. What is the RM port excactly which is next to the Shelf ACP port?

6. Is there a way OnComand can connect through the serial port?

[michaelll]

1. I am suppose to just get the system running and then hand it over to another overseas IT team so I went ahead it configured one port on each controller with a fixed IP for OnCommand. However I see those ports are the same that could be used for iSCSI traffic (but I would not know that as we have not given any more details on what is going to be done with the unit). Now the e0P port is called the Shelf ACP port which has got a IP address configured after I ran the initial Ontap configuration - but what excactly is it being used for? Would it be okay to configure one port of each controller card as the management port for general administration and can this be changed easily later on?

https://communities.netapp.com/thread/11765   - ACP Information    (Since you only have internal drives you will not connect anything to the ACP ports).

How you configure ports will depend on the network layout of the destination site, if you have a seperate vlan for iscsi then you will want to dedicate links to that.  Alternatively if you have the switches to support it you can configure VLAN tagging ontop of a VIF and make better use of limited ports.

2. The unit is fully populated with 600GB drives and I know for a fact that the technical guys are going to be wondering why aggr0 is using three of those disk and they cannot use it - if I would have done the hard drive specing I would have used smaller ones for the first three disk to be used by the NetApp OS. Is there any safe way to modify this or should I not ticker around with this disk config?

You cannot order a 2040 with 3 different drives, this is the way that they come. You can view a Netapp HA box as 2 devices that have the ability to failover to each other, as opposed to a single unit that is aggregating it's resources.  If you wanted to use all of the drives you would need to purchase another tray and you could define the root volume on that tray and allocate those disks to the B controller.  Both controllers require their own disks running their own root volumes.

3. Is there a NetAPP technical documentation template system implementars can use or is this left to the implementors own creativity? I was looking for something that highlights all the core configuration which i can fill in with the relevant details.

I am not sure what you are asking for here.

4. The current OS is DATA Ontap 8.0.1, should I upgrade and where can I find upgrade instructions?

The most current version is 8.1 GA, I would recommend installing this version, goto the NOW site and select it under Software Downloads, there are links to all the documents and installation instructions there.

5. What is the RM port excactly which is next to the Shelf ACP port?

RM the wrench icon is the Remote Management port (use the command bmc status to view its details).  This is the port you dedicate to management only, it allows you to view the console during boot up.

6. Is there a way OnComand can connect through the serial port? 

No, you must use CLI to interface through the serial port.

[aborzenkov]

To add to previous answer.

1. e0P is used for ACP (Alternate Control Path) as secondary monitoring and management channel for disk shelves. It is set up and configured automatically by Data ONTAP. If you do not have any external disk shelves you can simply disable it.

2. You are not required to have a separate root aggregate. There are plenty of discussions about this (last one I have seen just yesterday ☺ ). You can have single aggregate with root volume and data volumes in it.

3. I think, Software Setup Guide comes as the closest match to basic setup. Otherwise there are documentations used by NetApp Professional Service, but they probably are not freely available. And there are just far too many features to fit into any single paper in any case.

4. Personally I’d update to the latest 8.0.x version (8.0.2 or 8.0.3 if becomes available) unless you need features that only 8.1 supports.

5. “Wrench port” combines two devices (via internal hub) - Service Processor (remote console access, hardware status etc) and e0M port, which is simply 100Mb/s port that you can use as dedicated management port if your policy dictates it, so you do not waste 1Gb/s port for it.