Ontap Select two node cluster on VMware ESXi Host cluster

[vishalbmulik]

Need to evaluate Ontap Select on VMware. But before evaluating we need clarification on below:

1. Ontap Select is best suited for File based services or Block based services ?
2. Can we use the Ontap Select storage to Host VM's on NFS datastore ? What is best suited iSCSI or NFS for VM hosting?
3. Ontap Select VM appliance can coexist with general purpose application VM's or it requires a dedicated physical server ?

4. Does Ontap Select uses CPU reservations at hardware level ? 

5. Does Ontap Select on DAS support VMware HA, DRS,vmotion,etc. ?

6. While using ontap single node cluster on VMware what should be RAID config ? Software RAID or Hardware RAID ?

7.Can we mount the NFS share provided by the ONtap Select VM appliance on base Hypervisor (ESXi) Host on which the appliance itself is residing ? What is the recommendation from Netapp in such case?

8.Can we run OTS appliance alongside with DB VM's or workload intensive VM's hosting latency sensitive applications ? What is the suggested protocol for DB VM's / NFS or iSCSI ? What should be the network bandwidth used for the OTS Data traffic 10Gb or 1 Gb nics ? What are the recommendations for shared network storage in OTS ?

9.How the failover scenario take care of the OTS Appliance ? What will be the status of runnning VM's if OTS appliance goes down ? What will be the status of VM's if the Host goes down.

[insert-name-here · Accepted solution]

Hi @vishalbmulik,

You are best to start by reading TR-4517 which is "ONTAP Select on VMware" https://www.netapp.com/pdf.html?item=/media/10662-tr4517.pdf

1) ONTAP Select is the same as ONTAP where it uses the WAFL filesystem and you can run File, Block, and S3 on the same instance

2) Yes you can, probably best if you read the VMware NFS bestpractices white paper to understand the iSCSI vs NFS https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmware-nfs-bestpractices-white-paper-en.pdf

3) It can coexist (you need to understand your other workloads)

4) It uses CPU and Memory reservations at the hypervisor level

5) Yes

6) Read TR-4517 from page 19.  Software RAID is only supported on SSD read from page 30

7) Yes it can.  Depending on your configuration I have used hosts where the ONTAP VM automatically boots first and then scripts perform "rescan storage" and starts the other VMs on the ONTAP Select datastores.

😎 If you have good VMware skilled support staff yes you can, but this is such an involved question that you need to do some real design and understand your applications.  10GbE is required to connect ONTAP Select nodes (2x min 4x recommended).... read TR-4517

9) Read TR-4517 from page 48 "HA Failover and Giveback".  If a single ONTAP Select nodes fail and your mediator is up then there is no disruption.

[vishalbmulik]

Thanks for your prompt response. Sorry but it seems that point no. 8 was skipped or was not answered.I still have some queries regarding point no. 5 and 7.

Point number 5. I went through the online documentation regarding minimum requirement for Ontap Select URL : "https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-select/pdfs/sidebar/ONTAP_Select.pdf"

At page 6. of the Document , under general requirements, its mentioned that "• VMware VMotion, HA, and DRS are not supported." Could you please explain this statement.

Also for point no. 7, If I am using a standalone ESXi Hosts with single node OTS, in that case would you still recommend to run the standalone VM's on the NFS datastore provided my the OTS or would you recommend to run the standalone VM's on the local vmfs datastore to bypass the additional network layer and reduce the network latency added by NFS protocol instead.