The rapid proliferation of VMware as a leading virtualization platform has been driven by its robust feature set, scalability, and ability to optimize resource utilization. As organisations adopt VMware to enhance their IT infrastructure, the demand for efficient backup and restore solutions has surged. This demand is fuelled by several critical challenges inherent in virtualized environments, including data integrity, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements.   Key challenges faced by VMware users include the complexity of managing backups across dynamic and distributed environments, the need for minimal downtime during restore operations, and ensuring data consistency and reliability. Traditional backup solutions often fall short in addressing these issues, leading to potential data loss, extended recovery times, and increased administrative overhead.   With NetApp Backup and Recovery for VMware, all these issues can be overcome. Managed service from NetApp helps to efficiently orchestrate VM protection, upgrade service and manage your VMware estate of any scale and size.  NetApp Backup and Recovery is single control pane where you can provision storage, replicate volumes and protect VM’s. You can also protect SQL Server workload on NetApp ONTAP storage, which became generally available last month. For more information, check out the detailed blog post. Similar to private preview of protecting VMware, you could also try Kubernetes protection.   NetApp Backup and Recovery for VMware is available in private preview with advanced capabilities and offers following benefits:   NetApp managed backup solutions: Reducing the need for installing and maintaining backup server in an environment thereby simplifying management and reducing resource consumption. Long-term retention and archival: Efficiently store backup for years across tiers and locations Integration with VMware Tools: Leveraging native VMware APIs and tools for seamless integration and enhanced performance. Scalability and Flexibility: Support growing virtual environments without compromising on backup efficiency or recovery speed. Enhanced Security Features: With ONTAP integration, snapshots can be locked at the primary or secondary thus making it indelible from accidental deletion or malicious attack. Here is the high-level process to get onboarded to the VMware private preview setup:     If you observe the onboarding process, you don’t need a separate server to host the plugin. The prerequisites are mentioned in the NetApp backup and recovery for VMware document.   Onboarding: First step is to add an ONTAP clusters in the working environment where the datastores are hosted.         Go to the BlueXP->Protection-> Backup and Recovery page, choose VMware(preview) -> Discover and Manage You need to add vCenter details. NetApp Backup and Recovery will automatically discover all the datastores and VM's. If the VM must be backed up to object store then click "Offsite backup targets" in inventory page and provide details of backup targets to save the backups. Supported backups targets are AWS S3, Azure blob, NetApp StorageGrid & ONTAP S3.  There is option to view and add/ view bucket. Backup:   Create a policy to protect. Choose appropriate backup architecture, retention period, scheduling based on the business requirement.       Choose VM/datastore to protect and attach policy to the protection flow.  You could also group multiple datastores/VMs and create protection group instead of protecting individual VM's.  Once completed, your VM's are protected and good to trigger ad-hoc backup or wait for the backup to run as per the schedule. Once you are set, you could see protection details for protected VM's as following   Restore:    Restore process is intuitive and easy to follow. There could be hundreds of VMs running in an environment. Scrolling through the list takes time, so there is search option to quickly search for VM based on keywords. Select the snapshot to recovery VM and then select the location of snapshot(primary, secondary or object store)   Verify the details and optionally check the post-restore option to turn on the VM and click restore to initiate the operation. After the restore is complete login into the VM, validate and verify if the any lost files were restored.   Summary: Managing VMware backups with NetApp Backup and Recovery is simplified. To get started with NetApp Backup and Recovery for VMware, sign up by filling out this form to get special access to the private preview feature. The documentation for protecting VMware is available here. Explore this new service under NetApp Backup and Recovery and share us your feedback or queries with us at ng-backupservice-feedback@netapp.com.         ... View more

This post walks you through how to run an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server on LMStudio using powerful functions from the NetApp DataOps Toolkit. This setup lets you implement custom storage actions directly from your LLM-powered workspace on your laptop or workstation, enabling data management for AI and ML workflows.    For more information on MCP servers with the NetApp DataOps Toolkit, refer to this post.   Prerequisites   To run an MCP server in LMStudio for the NetApp DataOps Toolkit, you would need the following -  - Download and install LMStudio here. Ensure you have enough storage and memory to run a model locally. - Install uv. - Create a DataOps Toolkit config file using the command shown here.    Steps   Before you jump into the implementation, it is necessary to add or modify the mcp.json file in LMStudio. You can find it under 'Integrations'. Below is an example of mcp.json config file.  { "mcpServers": { "netapp_dataops_ontap_mcp": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "--from", "netapp-dataops-traditional", "netapp_dataops_ontap_mcp.py" ] }, "netapp_dataops_k8s_mcp": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "--from", "netapp-dataops-k8s", "netapp_dataops_k8s_mcp.py" ] } } }     The following video is a walkthrough of running an MCP server on LMStudio using NetApp DataOps Toolkit functions.        Using this minimal setup, you can implement an MCP server with the NetApp DataOps Toolkit and run it locally on your machine. Refer to the NetApp DataOps Toolkit Github repository for more information.      ... View more

FSx for ONTAP can be monitored using Amazon CloudWatch, which gathers and processes raw data from FSx for ONTAP in order to create readable, near real-time metrics. In this post, I’ll cover the basics of using Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor FSx for ONTAP performance and discuss some conclusions you can draw from those metrics. ... View more

From June through August 2025, NetApp delivered a series of enhancements to Workload Factory that further simplify deployment, improve resilience, and automate storage operations on FSx for ONTAP workloads. ... View more

This article was originally published in March 22 on netapp.io, discussing a specific use case for a single NetApp Trident PVC being used by multiple Kubernetes clusters.     ... View more