I thought I'd share a couple of Configuration Management experiences with you...
Last month I went into a customers account to perform a live demo/evaluation of Operations Manager in their environment, one of my preferred ways to demonstrate it's functionality (see demo post - http://communities.netapp.com/post!input.jspa?communityID=2026); During this time I was attempting to show the prospect the use of run cmd option (which runs an Ontap command on a controller or group of controllers); Although we couldn't run it as we'd not setup ssh and rsh was disabled on all controllers as standard;
Immedietley I thought "hmmmm rsh disabled as standard" sounds like a job for configuration management - so we created a quick configuration (pulled from an existing controller) checked the rsh option (value to disable) and then the Compare configurations across their entire estate (24 controllers); Guess what ? we found 8 controllers were rsh was in fact enabled - a great gap analysis!!; Better still we could then push the configuration out to go set these options (although their change management procedures and process stopped it us from deploying the change there and then)
Needless to say the prospect was impressed and is now a Operations Manager customer;
I also had a customer once tell me they had a performance problem with some NFS volumes on their controller - the administrator told me that the two controllers (whch formed a cluster) were configured identically and yet one exhibitied the poor performance were as the second was fine; Again I challenged this "they are configured the same" statement and created a configuration from the good controller and checked it against the bad controller; Immedieltely hightlighted was a misconfiguration in resolv.conf - once recitified the performance problem went away This was nice as many times people believe you need large complex environments to realise the benefit of OpsMgr
Any more configuration management stories or use cases ?
