Simplify and Accelerate Workflows for VMware vSphere with the New ONTAP tools 10.4

[ChanceBingen]

NetApp is excited to announce the release of ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10.4, the cornerstone of our VMware vSphere and Cloud Foundation integration.

ONTAP tools empowers vSphere administrators with simple and intuitive capabilities for provisioning, protecting, monitoring, and managing the entire lifecycle of their datastores using the NetApp ONTAP intelligent data infrastructure.

Administrators and SREs can take advantage of either the simple-to-use vCenter GUI extensions or robust REST API integration for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation (formerly Aria and vRealize Automation), Ansible, PowerShell/PowerCLI, or any other common automation platform or scripting language. Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) simplifies storage management and automation at scale using VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols).

ONTAP tools is built upon three pillars that lower TCO and risk through simplification and automation:

If you tried ONTAP tools before 10.3, be sure and check it out again because the installation process has been greatly simplified and now works out of the box without requiring any scale-out or scale-up for >90% of non-vVols users. For production vVols users, we always recommend scaling out for high-availability and load balancing, which is a hallmark of ONTAP tools 10. Scaling-up or scaling-out is now achieved by simply going to the appliance management UI and clicking the edit appliance settings option on either the main page or the “Getting Started” page.

If you are still using ONTAP tools 9, one more thing to know about ONTAP tools 10 is that it supports adding multiple vCenter servers to one appliance, whereas in the past, we always required one appliance per vCenter.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of vVols support for all ASA systems launched, now including the ASA A1K, A90, and A70, as well as the new entry-level ASA A20 and midrange ASA A30 and A50. Previous generations of ASA and all Unified systems retain their existing support.

Let's take a high-level look at the advantages of using Vols with this new storage architecture.

1	The new storage architecture of the latest ASA systems enables truly fine-grained control of iSCSI and FCP-based vVols with ONTAP systems. You no longer need to worry about managing and monitoring FlexVols because the latest ASA storage architecture is based on the new Storage Availability Zone (SAZ) concept. The entire cluster becomes the vVols container! It doesn’t get any easier than that!
2	The new ASA systems support consistency groups (CGs) for Storage Units (SUs), which include LUNs and NVMe namespaces (note: NVMe namespaces are not currently supported with vVols on new ASA systems). As a result, ONTAP tools will automatically generate new consistency groups for each virtual machine (VM), ensuring write-order consistency for all data across the VM's vVols. A single VM may contain multiple CGs if necessary, but you won’t need to manage these CGs manually, as the software will handle them automatically.
3	In traditional ONTAP systems, using vCenter-managed snapshots results in ONTAP tools FlexCloning the vVols and exposing the clones back to vSphere as the snapshot disks. These cloned disks are counted towards the volume, platform, and cluster limits for the total count of LUNs and namespaces. In the new ASA systems, snapshots are stored as part of the SU construct and no longer count towards your limits unless vSphere requests read/write access to the snapshot; in this case, temporary SUs based on the snapshot will be used to handle I/O.
4	All metadata vVols for a given VM are only counted once. This means that config, memory, and swap vVol types only count as one storage unit per-VM towards your platform limits, even though they are each a unique LUN in their own right. In traditional ONTAP systems, these would count as 3 (or more) LUNs towards your limits.
5	Since there is no FlexVol to attach Protocol Endpoints (PEs) to as we would with traditional ONTAP systems, ONTAP tools will automatically create one PE per node per datastore for you. It will also automatically scale up the PE counts as your vVols count increases. You don’t need to worry about managing PEs, it’s always handled automatically for you by ONTAP tools.

Limits for vVol counts are generally going to match what you see in Hardware Universe for your version of ONTAP and system type. ONTAP tools 10.4 itself currently supports up to ~100K vVols with a 3-node HA-large deployment, but please check the configuration limits section of the prerequisites page, as this number continues to increase as ONTAP tools evolves. If you have smaller systems, ONTAP tools will let you add multiple ONTAP storage clusters to reach the scale you need.

With all that said, let's take a look at what new and updated capabilities ONTAP tools 10.4 delivers:

Features	Description
Support for new ASA 12-node clusters	This release introduces support for expanded ASA 12-node workflows, enabling more efficient and scalable data management on NetApp’s new ASA family, the A20, A30, A50, A70, A90, and flagship A1K. ·       iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) ·       iSCSI, FC, and NVMe for VMware File System (VMFS) ·       SRA using SnapMirror asynchronous for iSCSI and FC VMFS datastores
SnapMirror fan-out support	ONTAP tools now supports fan-out from SnapMirror active sync (SMas) to SnapMirror asynchronous (SMa) replicas for Unified and ASA systems.
Persistent reservation support for vVols	When ONTAP tools 10.4 is used with ONTAP version 9.16.1P3 and later, you can now use SCSI3 persistent reservations with vVols. This enables in-guest clustered applications, such as those hosted on Windows Server Failover Clusters with shared storage.
Ease of use	NTP Server Configuration: Users can now configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers directly within the ONTAP tools management interface, ensuring accurate time synchronization across the environment. Telemetry Configuration: The new release allows for the configuration of telemetry settings, enabling better monitoring and analysis of system performance.
Enhanced security	Security features have been enhanced to provide better protection and compliance with industry standards.
Enhanced SRA disaster recovery capabilities	The Storage Replication Adaptor for VMware Site Recovery Manager and Live Site Recovery now supports custom snapshot names, including those taken by SnapCenter and third-party applications, in addition to existing support for standard ONTAP snapshot naming conventions.

ONTAP tools 10.4 can be downloaded here: https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/products/all/details/otv10/downloads-tab/download/65001/10.4/downloads

You can find the documentation here: ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere documentation.

The best practices guide for vVols can be found here: TR-4400: VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) with NetApp ONTAP.

The best practices guide for SRA can be found here: TR-4900: VMware Site Recovery Manager with NetApp ONTAP.

The general best practices guide for VMware with ONTAP can be found here: TR-4597: VMware vSphere for ONTAP.