yyaazz's tech thoughts

I usually do my Data ONTAP tests with the simulator as I don’t have NetApp hardware in my lab. Last week we got a NetApp FAS2040 system for two weeks and I decided to make some VAAI tests.

About the configuration:

• Cisco UCS B200 blade system with two X5550 sockets and 48GB of RAM
• NetApp FAS2040 with 12×300 FC 15krpm disks. For this test I’ve created an aggregate of 9 disks.
• Cisco Nexus 5010 with 4Gb FC connection to the NetApp box

I went throught the same steps with VAAI enabled and disabled configurations. At the beginning I had a Windows VM with 40GB hard disk.

• add a new Hard Disk to the VM, 100GB, thick, cluster supported (zeroed)
• clone the VM (with the added disk) within the same LUN
• clone the VM to another LUN
• Storage VMotion the VM Read more…

In the first two posts of this series (here and here) we saw the Virtual Storage Console and the SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure and how they integrate together. In this part I try to show what happens to the snapshots if the volume is replicated to a remote site. For remote replication NetApp has a very efficient tool, called SnapMirror. SnapMirror works pretty well with Flexible Volumes, Thin Provisioning, and of course with deduplication. SnapMirror today has compression support, and these things together helps to reduce bandwidth utilization.

SnapMirror is quite easy, a lot of blog and howto posts are available and of course the official documentation. I don’t take care of the SnapMirror setup in this post, I assume it’s OK. At this point I have a source volume (srmvol) and a destination volume (srmvolsm) which are in sync. Deduplication and compression are enabled.

Read more…

In the previous part I started to present how NetApp Virtual Storage Console and SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure integration works. I’ve created a backup then checked it on the controller and finally made a restore. In that example the restore handled the whole volume, so the other VMs running there were also affected (restored). In this post I’ll show how can be the restore handled more efficiently and how the single file restore works.

For today’s example I created a backup called ‘smvi-singlefile-2′ of the same virtual machine, then removed the kernel of the operating system. With the single file restore I can mount the backup today and copy out whatever I need. Let’s see how to do it:

Read more…