Category NetApp

Yea, I know I just wrote this post yesterday NetApp System Manager (NSM) 1.0 FCS Released! DOWNLOAD NOWZ! and my good friend Steve also released this on the NetApp Blogs:  NetApp System Manager 1.0

But while demoing this to some folks who hadn’t seen it before I noticed something I completely overlooked before!

To which I immediately stated “ZOMG! This is cool!” Seriously.  How often have you been in the scenario of wanting/needing to know how much space you’d reclaim from purging a snapshot – Now it’s even easier! ZOMG! WOOHOO! etc. :)

Not to mention there is this super cool Deduplication visual as well!

The section on the left is “Before” deduplication, and the right is “After”

There is so much more in here that is so cool, but I had to call out these two things, because wow! Just Wow! That’s so cool!

NetApp® System Manager 1.0 – Download

Wow, seriously! The NSM (NetApp System Manager) is now available for public consumption! Yes that means you! The public!

Where do I get it? – Login to now.netapp.com and scroll down in your downloads list and look for “System Manager” like I have shown below!

So, what are the really cool things you can do in the NSM? Let’s take a look!

Here is an look at what systems I am managing – Oh look! It paired my clusters, oh my! :)

Over on the right side, when you have your cluster selected you’ll see four sections, Properties, Performance, Notifications and Reminders

If you click on the little Arrows you will get taken into detail of that particular entry – So if I select the HA Pair, I’ll get more depth on the HA Pair – Etc! :)

I think this is pretty self-explanatory – But what is really cool is – Click the little Arrow and…!

You get the same information, but in numbers instead of little graphs! So pretty cool!

Various notifications will appear here – in my case, it happens to be License notifications – This lab box has a couple of expired Eval Licenses – So now you’ll be able to see this at a glance!

And the last high-level point is Reminders! In this case, it would appear I have disks to assign!

Going back to the main cluster overview – You can also drill down into some depth on specific filers! Here are the main sections! Storage, Configuration, Diagnostics and A/A Config!

Each of these sections have some pretty cool things you can do, and are fairly straight forward

And lastly the Active/Active Settings!

I’m not going to go into too much because you can find it yourself when you install the tool, but one thing I wanted to point out which is pretty cool is the Deduplication option! – If you click on Volumes you will be able to start Deduplication right there from the GUI!

Or from a Volume itself..

So, I won’t bore you too much on the details, but feel free to drill down, ask any questions, check out the NetApp Communities where this will be discussed and this blog and twitter! :)

Oh, and don’t forget to download it! :)

This is a question I get asked often, and I always mean to write a post about it.. so here goes!

Which tools do you use?

That is an excellent question! I use the following tools: TweetDeck on my Mac and my PC (Primarily PC due to that being my primary machine), Tweetie on my iPhone, and the Web interface on my Windows Mobile Treo (Because WM5 does not have any good ceApps) Note: I am trying out Seesmic Desktop at the moment in Beta, though primarily using it for Searches due to the color scheme being almost unbearable for me!

Why do you use those tools?

Let me put it simply by saying: These are the best tools available for Twitter on a regular basis.   I agree there are a lot of other tools out there, but more tools does not mean better!  As an example, Tweetie is a far better client than TwitterFon which is by far the 2nd best client for the iPhone (And it’s free!) If you’re using Twinkle or Twitterific today, Upgrade to TwitterFon for free or Tweetie for the nominal fee, it will change your twitter experience on the whole!

How do you use those tools?

TweetDeck:

• I have a column called “Technology” where friends and others in the Tech field (Direct Technical, Marketing, Analysts, Bloggers, YouTube, Blogosphere, Storage, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Etc) are all stored.  Basically if you’re in my “Technology” column, among all of the chatter on twitter, I guarantee I’ll read it when I’m in front of this computer :)
• I also have a column called “Chicago” where friends, folks, people I meet, etc from Chicago who are on twitter are ‘stored’.  And yes, some people are in both Technology *AND!* Chicago, which works out well :)
• On a similar note, I do have a column called NetApp, this is where I store NetApp employees, and only NetApp employees – It’s a smaller list with fewer updates, and thus I’m less likely to miss those as well
• One additional column is a “Search” column, searching for “netapp OR netapps OR ntap” whereby when there’s chatter about our company, a typo of our company or our stock, I can see it!  I’ve used this numerous times to help folks who ran into issues with our systems or equally for those inquiring about information.  I like to help, so this is a great vehicle for that helping!

Tweetie:

• Honestly, I use Tweetie almost the same way I use TweetDeck, except without the groups – so when I’m on the go, it is primarily to read @ responses and DM’s, and random chatter in the ‘all friends’ column, because I lack the grouping capabilities of TweetDeck!

Web:

• Web is truly the only way I can work on my WM5 Treo, so I’ll launch it if I need to/want to share something and my iPhone is dead or has no signal!  This is especially useful when we’re out as a family and we’re tweeting to eachother in a museum or something :)

Seesmic Desktop:

• Seesmic Desktop is interesting, it provides a number of features (more or less, the exact same features of TweetDeck) with the exception that Seesmic supports multiple accounts, and can expand beyond 10 columns.   It’s lack of color changing support makes it nearly unbearable for me, because as you can tell from this blog, I read text against a black background, and when it’ falls against a light background, I have a hard time reading it.  But I’m giving it some rigorous testing in its course! (Though, for what it’s worth… Seesmic is a memory hog, akin to the old TweetDeck Pre v0.25days) Oh and it just crashed on me when I noticed it took out my API limit for the hour ;)

So, hopefully this helps explain and helps you use these tools a bit yourself!  I’ll break it down a bit more over time, but this is just a high-level touch of how I do some of these things (and effectively, and enjoyably :))

Wait, what’s this? I thought these tests were only available at the Prometric Testing Center!

Apparently I am wrong! and just by visiting this site, I’m able to take online tests at Prometric!

Infact, there’s even a whole list of other companies for online testing here as well :)

These exams (as far as I can tell) are Free so long as you pass it the first time! If you fail, it sits at $50.00 for the retake, so I suggest not failing :)

I know some of you have been waiting patiently for MBRAlign after finding out that your ESX Virtual Machines have been out of alignment all this time (A common trend which affects nearly everyone who uses ESX!)

Well, the wait is over! Now you can actually go and download MBRAlign directly from the NetApp toolchest, without having to wait for someone (like me;)) to give you a copy to download! (I do appreciate you asking, and am more than happy to provide you the tools in any event :))

If you’ve used the MBRScan tool before, in order to determine if your machines are aligned or not, that is still available as part of the VMware ESX Host Utilities Kit (v5)

And now you can download MBRAlign directly from the NetApp Toolchest! Hoorah!  I implore you to please read the mbralign.pdf first before you do anything!

For some additional information on this, I encourage you to check out the NetApp community article which echos a number of these statements.

UPDATE – mbralign is available from the ToolChest on the now.netapp.com website

So, check it out, let me know if you run into any problems or issues and I’ll see what I can do about em! ;)