Migrate from ONTAP NFS mount to Solidfire as NFS

[vjrk]

Have couple of Virtual vm's which are getting shared fileystems form ONTAP and they'r set to decommission, we would like to migrate them off to solidfire . The questions I have , 

Does solidfire support NFS mounts ? 
What are the ways of creating NFS on VMs from solidfire storages ? 

[elementx · Accepted solution]

1) SolidFire is block storage, and only supports iSCSI.

2) Buy and install ONTAP Select VM on VMware, assign it enough VMDKs, configure ONTAP to share its disks via NFS. (If you have NetApp HCI, you may even have an existing ONTAP Select license entitlement, as those were included with NetApp HCI for during one period; whether or not you have it, you can check on your PO for NetApp HCI. Stand-alone SolidFire wasn't shipped with free ONTAP entitlements, so if it's not NetApp HCI,  there's no need to check).

https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap-select/concept_ots_overview.html

OTS on NetApp HCI (can be useful for any VMware environment with SolidFire): https://www.netapp.com/media/17107-tr4669.pdf

The same can be done with Linux VMs, possibly at a low cost (of course, NFS service on those isn't as good, but may be good enough for simple use cases).

HA:

In the case of ONTAP Select, you can deploy two VMs for HA. Or use just one, and VMware HA to make sure the VM is always running somewhere on vSphere cluster.

In the case of Linux VMs, it's usually best to rely on VMware HA.

What is the workload/data like?

If your NFS shares are today used to store VMware VMDKs, you may not need NFS on SolidFire - just Storage vMotion those VMs to SolidFire iSCSI.

[vjrk]

The requirement is for file sharing / FTP for vendors and its a very small size requirements for few apps. 
Our  Netapp setup includes HCC, mnode, active IQ , element OS on storage nodes but no computer nodes . Does that comes under Netapp HCI ? 

[elementx]

You likely have a SolidFire-only setup.

ONTAP 9 doesn't support FTP, so if you were to use it, you'd also need another VM with FTP service (e.g. Linux) to share NFS data via (S)FTP. If the capacity requirement is small, ONTAP Select is not going to be costly. You'd need vSphere 7 or maybe even 6.7U3.

Or, if you just setup a Linux VM  instead and do NFS and (S)FTP from the same VM, that can work as well, although w/o ONTAP snapshots and other features that you'd get from ONTAP Select. You could use this with any platform that can run Linux VMs.

[vjrk]

Our current setup is on ONTAP9 which acts as file share , so its necessarily doesnt need to have ftp running on ONTAP.  The host which mounts the NFS has the the feature to FTP. 
The requirement is just to have shared file systems preferably NFS since other shared filesystems doesnt work well without clustering softwares running on it. 

Since ONTAP9 select or solidfire wouldn't be an option I would think of the alternative. Thanks for your reply. 

[elementx]

ONTAP Select 9 + SolidFire should work fine for that, just setup another Linux VM to export NFS via FTP as you already have

[vjrk]

Without license, ONTAP select 9 wouldn't be an option is what I meant. This is a small requirement. Thanks for all your suggestions.