Anyone who’s tried to remove Snapmirror relationships using the NetApp commandline knows how painful it is. Recently, I had a need to remove all snapmirror relationships from a number of NetApp storage systems and figured I’d play with NetApp’s PowerShell toolkit to see if I could semi-automate the process.
Category: Storage
Background
Isilon, if you’re not aware of it, is a clustered Scale-out NAS solution from EMC. The article below covers setting up a virtual Isilon cluster suitable for experimenting and testing out Isilon in a VMware ESXi-based lab environment.
Scenario and scope
- Create a 3-node virtual EMC Isilon storage cluster on VMware ESXi.
- This guide is written for ESXi Standalone (Free edition) in my home lab, but should be applicable to a “real” Virtual Infrastructure setup with vCenter, too.
Abstract
This blog post covers how I tracked down when SMB 2.1 support was re-enabled in ONTAP 8.1.x 7-mode, having been disabled in the initial release of 8.1.2.
Scope
This guide is written for fixing a corrupt or broken RLM firmware. It is applicable to both 4.x and 3.x versions of the RLM firmware. Although this may help with other corrupt or broken RLM issues, the most common error this fixes is
[rlm.firmware.update.failed:warning]: RLM firmware update failed, Error Flashing linux.
Last week, via a tweet from Frank Denneman, I discovered a whitepaper that covers the differences between storage IOPS and storage throughput, as well as best practises for performance benchmarking.
As someone relatively new to the inner workings of storage, I found it very enlightening. Particularly the fact that there’s a clear difference between IOPS and throughput, and you need to decide what you want from a storage system before you benchmark it. Well worth a read, even if it’s the first 9 pages which covers the different types of workload (IOPS vs Storage).
The whitepaper from EMC is here: Elements Of Performance And Testing Best Practices Defined
Frank’s post, with a summary of the white paper is here: Awesome read: Storage Performance And Testing Best Practices
Share and enjoy 🙂