The vFilers are showing up now - but it really SUCKS there is no support for VAAI with vFilers Anyone know when VAAI + vFilers is coming? thanks! ... View more

So I found some vFilers are being discovered now, but others are showing up as unknown and it seems those don't have SSL enabled. secureadmin shows the ssh is enabled, but where is ssl configured on the vfiler level? secureadmin status                        ssh2    - active ssh1    - active thanks ... View more

According to http://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-6534 vFilers should be discovered as of VSC 2.0 and Ontap 7.3.1.1 - so I'll need to troubleshoot why they are not in my case MultiStore vFiler unit support Does VSC support MultiStore vFiler units? Yes, vFilers are now supported as of VSC 2.0. vFilers are discovered in the same manner as physical controllers. vFilers have the same ONTAP version restrictions as physical controllers. All vFiler hostnames will be pre-pended with "MultiStore:" in the hostname of the Overview panel. VSC only communicates with the vFiler.   VSC cannot determine the physical controller (aka vFiler0). vFiler storage totals will be calculated by adding up all the available storage owned by the vFiler. vFilers don't have a concept of disks like physical controllers do.   The Total Capacity and Total Allocated columns will be the same. What version of Data ONTAP is required for vFiler support? Data ONTAP 7.3.1.1+ is required for VSC to discover vFilers.  Please see the NetApp Interoperability matrix for specific support configurations. What VSC features are not available on a MultiStore vFiler unit? vFilers do not support SSL. Supported protocols column – The column displays the license protocols allowed by the controller. As mentioned above, VSC only talks to the actual vFiler. When a controller is a vFiler unit, the "supported protocols" column will be presented as the protocols "in-use". For instance, if an NFS export is found by VSC, NFS will be listed. If an iSCSI LUN is discovered as well, both NFS and iSCSI will be listed. Overall Status column – This column displays the operational state of the controller.   If VSC is communicating with the vFiler, it's in the "running" state. To be consistent with physical controllers, a state of "running" will be presented as "Normal". vFilers in any of the other 4 states (these are non-operational states) will not be discoverable by VSC. Overall Status Reason – This column displays the details status returned by the controller. vFilers do not return a status reason, so the following string will be printed for the status reason: "This controller is a MultiStore vFiler unit." The following columns are not applicable for vFilers. These will be left blank. Controller partner CFmode CFmode status FilerView cannot be launched from VSC on vFilers ... View more

I opened a case to make sure all the issues are covered and to formulate a plan for 1st reallocation then scheduled reallocation jobs. For instance I read there are free space requirements for volume reallocate jobs. I'll post our findings once we get some numbers for before and after reallocation. thanks ... View more

The good news is our before and after VM benchmarks show a near linear spindle:vm throughput improvement with the addition of the 21 disks to the 46 disk aggregate: http://www.vmadmin.info/2011/08/more-spindlesmore-vm-throughput.html One open question is: will WAFL re-stripe the existing VM volumes over the newly added disk spindles over time?  (we CLONED the VM to ensure the VM was striped across all disks for the AFTER benchmark) Will existing VMs need a similar operation to gain the full benefits of the added spindles? thanks ... View more

Yes, so the GOS is aligned, but some operations may not be aligned (like Oracle logging) Other Questions: 1) How do we guage the relative  significance of this unaligned IO? 2) Why are there multuple counters listed for the same file? 3) What do the values of the counters mean? 4) When should any action be taken on this data? http://vmadmin.info ... View more

Well the Netapp engineer not so helpfully just emailed a link - completely ignoring the nfsstat -d output: Please refer to the following knowledge base article link which shows how to identify and fix misaligned Windows Virtual Machine disks in your environment: https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&id=1011402 Please let me know if you need any further assistance in this regard. I just came across a "soon to come" teaser from http://www.vmdamentals.com/ "The devil is in the details: How aligned VMs may still be misaligned" Sounds like our issue... ... View more

Friday 8pm we experienced a latency event (spike) which was logged by 30+ VMs I've opened a case on this to see what role misaligned IO as reported by nfsstat -d is playing thanks ... View more

Keith, thanks for the tip on scheduling the dedup BEFORE the nightly snapshots - I moved the dedup job up 2 hours before the midnight snapshots: Its too early to tell for sure, but last night's snapdelta 47.48Gb (as reported by filerview) was less than half the pre-schedule change deltas: On this volume we have 94 VM images with an average of 22Gb per VM used: I moved the dedup job up for our 2nd biggest VM volume to see if the snap delta reduction is realized there too Our goal is to be able to retain more daily snaps in the same space thanks! ... View more

We're doing nightly snapshots which by default (can you change the timing of nightly snaps?) happen at midnight. Dedup for this volume was schduled for midnight as well I've moved the dedup to 10pm and we'll see if this helps There has to be a way to tell which files (VMs) are contributing the most to snap deltas - if Netapp is serious about being a cloud storage solution they need a tool for guaging this I don't have an obvious VM like DB or defrag thanks ... View more

VMware released an award winning product called vCenter Operations - it takes in all the diagnostic information and uses dynamic heuristics to identify resource constraints in key areas. This tool helped me identify some important issues I could not have seen unless I was constantly watching and collecting data and analyzing it I realize I need the same kind of tool for ONTAP Our fiber loops have a switch for 1,2,4 Gb - they are currently set to 2 Gb, so one question I have is - how close are we getting to loop saturation? thanks ... View more

By watching the /etc/log/auditlog on the snapmirror source I was able to determine the root cause was a snapmirror.access config issue This log entry clued me in to check the snapmirror options. options snapmirror.checkip.enable The other (working) heads were set to legacy for snapmirror.access I resolved this with "options snapmirror.access legacy" thanks ... View more

Rebooted (actually upgraded the destination cluster to 7.3.5.1P2 and rebooted) but the error persists: irt-na02> vfiler dr configure pw-vf-01@irt-na04 irt-na04's Administrative login: root irt-na04's Administrative password: irt-na04: An error occurred while trying to commit the registry (Registry operation error). I've opened a case on this thanks ... View more

Ok, I've re-engaged with support to update the testpoint to workaround the max volume issue yes, we can resolve the volume name conflicts separately on our own thanks ... View more

the destination is a 3270 (we are using a testpoint supplied by netapp support to bypass the model check). Apparently it is defaulting to a low max volume value for migrations! How can I persuade NMC & DFM to use the correct higher value for the 3270 destination? This is the last vfiler I need to migrate - so any help is much appreciated thanks ... View more

Yes, did a "vfiler context vfiler0" (eventhough the context prompt did not show it was in the problem vfiler) and it succeeded thanks! ... View more