With the release of ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 9.11, NetApp has added exciting new capabilities to the vSphere administrators and SREs' toolboxes.
With rising concerns surrounding ransomware attacks, insider attacks, and miscellaneous cyber-crime, and developments with the war in Ukraine on the morning news every day; cyber-warfare has become one of the most important things we think about in our day-to-day lives.
As a refresher, the ONTAP tools appliance provides the easy-to-use vCenter plugin, REST API server, VASA Provider, and Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager. With security in mind, the 9.11 release of ONTAP tools appliance adds support for securing your datastores during provisioning with the following:
- Kerberos Krb5 authentication
- Kerberos Krb5i authentication with inspection.
As shown below, the intuitive wizard simply asks you to choose your Kerberos options, and click next.
And for the SRE, all these options are also exposed via REST API, so you can provision and protect your datastores using standard automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation.
We also haven't forgotten about our block protocol customers! Also new in 9.11 is the ability to create custom initiator groups (igroups). This simplifies the asset tracking processes by allowing you to give your igroups meaningful names, like "Marketing_Data_Cluster1_iSCSI" for example. You simply provide the naming convention, and we automatically suffix it with the protocol. This helps when you might have the same cluster using two different protocols by automatically avoiding naming collisions.
Like the wizard shown above, we've updated the SAN provisioning wizard with the new options shown below. Likewise, for the SRE, this too is now exposed via REST API for easy adoption into your service catalog.
And of course, there are a ton of other improvements under the covers, such as support for ONTAP 9.11.1 and upgrading the appliance OS to the Debian Bullseye release, making the appliance more secure and more reliable than ever.
For more information, see ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere documentation resources.