Using PowerShell to prevent thinly provisioned NetApp LUNs from going offline – Part I
Posted: November 28, 2014 Filed under: NetApp, PowerShell / PowerCLI, Storage | Tags: autogrow, autosize, fractional reserve, lun, lun offline, luns, NetApp, netapp best practices, netapp powershell, netapp powershell toolkit, netapp toolkit, no space, nospc, powershell toolkit, snap autodelete, snapshot autodelete, vol best practices, volume, volume best practices 1 CommentHappy Day-after Thanksgiving dear readers! I hope everyone is as satisfyingly full on food, friends, and family as I am. As an early gift to myself, I’m writing a PowerShell script that utilizes NetApp’s PowerShell Toolkit. The script will help me quickly determine current volume and LUN settings so I can see what LUNs are at risk of going offline due to out of space conditions. In scripting tradition, I couldn’t find anything online that did exactly what I wanted so I rolled my own!
Here’s what the output looks like. The column names are abbreviated because I expect to have several more columns. The abbreviations are, Volume Thin Provisioning, Fractional Reserve, Snapshots, Volume AutoGrow, Snapshot AutoDelete.
NetApp Initiator Group Best Practices for VMFS LUNs
Posted: November 3, 2014 Filed under: NetApp, Storage | Tags: igroup, initiator, initiator group, luns, NetApp Leave a commentI’m often asked by my clients the best way to configure NetApp igroups when connecting to VMware VMFS LUNs, especially after I deploy a new system for them and I’m training them on their use. I appreciate the question because it means someone’s actually thinking through why something is configured the way it is rather than just throwing something together.
The Problem
So this is what I see a lot of out in the field. Single igroups are created with multiple initiators from multiple hosts. This can be a problem, though, as I’ll show you. Functionally, this configuration will work – each host will be able to see each LUN, all things being equal. The problem arises when you want to either 1. remove a host from the igroup or 2. stop presenting a LUN to only a subset of hosts.
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