ONTAP 9.1 Flash Pool Management

ONTAP 9.1 Flash Pool :

A Flash Pool is the newest addition to the NetApp® Virtual Storage Tier. It is a technology that allows Flash technology in the form of solid-state disks (SSDs) and traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) to be combined to form a single Data ONTAP® aggregate. When SSD and HDD technologies are combined in a Data ONTAP aggregate, the NetApp storage system takes advantage of the latency and throughput benefits of SSD while maintaining the mass storage capacity of HDD.

Requirements for using Flash Pools

The Flash Pool technology has some configuration requirements that you should be aware of before planning to use it in your storage architecture.

Flash Pools cannot be used in the following configurations:

• 32-bit aggregates
• Aggregates composed of array LUNs
• Aggregates that use the ZCS checksum type

Read-only volumes, such as SnapMirror destinations, are not cached in the Flash Pool cache.

How Flash Pools work

The Flash Pool technology enables you to add one or more RAID groups composed of SSDs to an aggregate that consists of RAID groups of HDDs.

The SSDs provide a high-performance cache for the active data set of the data volumes provisioned on the Flash Pool, which offloads I/O operations from the HDDs to the SSDs. For random workloads, this can increase the performance of the volumes associated with the aggregate by improving the response time and overall throughput for I/O-bound data access operations. 

The SSD cache does not contribute to the size of the aggregate as calculated against the maximum aggregate size. For example, even if an aggregate is at the maximum aggregate size, you can add an SSD RAID group to it. The SSDs do count toward the overall spindle limit.

The HDD RAID groups in a Flash Pool behave the same as HDD RAID groups in a standard aggregate, following the same rules for mixing disk types, sizes, speeds, and checksums.

Creating Flash Pool:

Create an aggregate first.

In this example i have used the aggr name is aggr_flash and disks are FCAL disks.

After creating Aggregate, check the hybrid-enabled ontion, by default is false.

Modify that Aggregate option to true.

Now check the RAID status of an aggregate.
At this list, this aggregate contains 4 disks.

Now add the SSD disks to an existing aggregate.

Now you have two raid group with FCAL and SSD disks also.

To design and caluculate the number of SSD disks need to add an existing aggregate, then run the AWA (Automated Workload Analyzer).

You can print the out put report and analyse the number of SSD disks.

And also you can change the volume that is using the flash pool with the following caching policies.

To list the statistics of falsh pool aggregate.

Using system manager also you can view the status of flash pool.

You can monitor the flash pool statistics also in System Manager.

NetApp ONTAP 9.1 CLI Cluster Setup

ONTAP 9.1 CLI Cluster Setup:






In Node1 and Node2, either we can do it through web browser using guided cluster setup or CLI.

First node you start with cluster create.
Select this setup is the single node cluster or switched or switch less multi node cluster.

Default e0a and e0b interface will be used for cluster network.

Set admin password.

It is creating cluster network setup first.
Add the cluster base license now.

Now add the additional feature license.

Set the cluster management interface and ip address.

Set the controller location.

Now go to second node, node2 and join to an existing cluster.

Select the default cluster network interface like e0a and e0b.
Then select the name of an existing cluster name to join.

Joining to the cluster.

Now node2 also ready.

Cluster show command lists the status of the nodes.

Master node, node1 will have an Epsilon also.

List the interface information using network interface show.

Now connect from web browser using system manager.

System Manager 9.1 New dash board.
You can able to see the two nodes.

Listing the disks information. FCAL and SSD disks also.

Setting the time zone and NTP server information.

Listing the time stamp of the cluster nodes.

Modifying the time stamp.

NetApp ONTAP 9.1 Guided Cluster Setup

ONTAP 9.1 Cluster Setup and New Features:

New Features:

ONTAP 9.1 brings:

• Tons of brand new platforms
• NetApp FlexGroup (GA) with Unified Manager.
• NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE)
• SnapMirror to AltaVault/cloud
• 12 node SAN clusters
• Native Foreign LUN Import with AFF support (no PVR needed!)
• System Manager improvements (FlexGroup GUI, storage efficiency reporting, new cluster setup workflow)
• SAP HANA support for AFF templates
• Azure support for ONTAP cloud
• Trusted Platform Module
• 32GB FC
• SMB 3.1.1 AES-128-GCM encryption (~1.7 times faster than CCM in ONTAP 9.0!)
• 40GB Ethernet

Cluster Setup:

1. Once you set the node Management IP and Port then you can do configure using CLI or System Manager.

2. Access through the Node Management IP. You can use the Config CSV files or Guided setup.

3. This will discover the nodes, set the cluster name and optionally add the license information.

4. Network Configuration.
Setting the Cluster Management Portt and IP. DNS and NTP server information.

5. Support Configuration.
Setting auto support config and Event logs Management details.
System Config backup location also.

6. Now the Cluster setup is done successfully. Now you can access from cluster mgmt ip and manage the cluster.

 7. Access through your cluster management ip and Login.

8. This is the new enhanced dash board in ONTAP 9.1

9. Creating a new aggregates.

10. New RAID level RAID-TEC which supports up to 3 HDD failure.

11. You can create a SVM.

12. SVM successfully created.

13. Flexvol creation.

14. Flexgroup volume creation.

A FlexGroup volume is a scale-out NAS container that leverages the cluster resources to provide performance and scale. FlexGroup volumes provide high performance along with automatic load distribution and scalability.

A FlexGroup volume contains a number of constituents that automatically and transparently share a traffic load. 

15. Now you can create a flexgroup volumes.