Don’t worry about catching it late–after all, I posted it many, many months late.

Cool you posted this…thank you. I only caught it a month late Roger posted our presentation to the partner portal on the NetApp Insight page, and he also posted a lighter version of it on PartnerCenter for employees and partners to reference. Also, I can send you or ftp the 11 minute avi video from the presentation. Nothing proprietary and running from my laptop showing both vfiler migrate and vfiler dr.

MultiStore does support FTP. Status of a vFiler below that shows all protocols for a vFiler. All are allowed by default (we have a request in for future ONTAP to disallow by default then have the administrator allow protocols they want).

Allowed: proto=rsh
Allowed: proto=ssh
Allowed: proto=nfs
Allowed: proto=cifs
Allowed: proto=iscsi
Allowed: proto=ftp
Allowed: proto=http

One other note… vfiler dr doesn’t change the volume option “fs_size_fixed” from on to off with “vfiler dr activate”. So, if the DR site is running for a long period of time before resync back to the repaired source, and you need to grow a volume, you’ll have to turn this option off to utilize additional space added to a volume.

To elaborate on qtrees, we used to use qtrees more with vFilers before ONTAP 7G (to better utilize legacy traditional volumes). With FlexVols we have the same utilization benefit we had with qtrees on tradvols. When using FlexVols instead of qtrees, vFiler dr/migrate use volume mirror which give the advantage of keeping dedup over the wire (not rehydrating data like qsm), and also if we leverage snapmover (vfiler migrate -m nocopy) then we need the vFiler to own all FlexVols in the aggregates used for the vFiler. Also, if an nfs mount is on a qtree and the parent volume of the qtree is not owned by the vFiler, a vFiler migrate will migrate the qtree with qsm and the target qtree will not be accessible without a client remount (volume fsid isn’t changed). However, if the parent FlexVol is owned by the vFiler, then the qtree mount is accessible since VSM is used and the fsid and file handles are moved to the target FlexVol. Nothing against qtrees though…I still use them a lot but don’t assign individual qtrees to vFilers.

We do some cool things with vFilers for DMZ readonly data sharing…use a FlexClone or a SnapMirror of data in one vFiler to another. You can use the loopback adapter but running the mirror from vfiler0, then you don’t need any network connection between the vfilers and it’s still secure but can have a copy of any data you want…

For management, definitely a lot of cli. If customers use the cli already they are comfortable. if they use FilerView, then they have some learning curve. API has support for vFilers…so hopefully the new NSM will support vfilers in a future release.

Another note…it’s worth a day (often less than a day) of PS to get MultiStore setup properly….it’s not rocket science, but those who work with it a lot can do in minutes what might take others hours so it saves cost to pay for a day or half a day for setup. For example, the /etc/rc file isn’t always updated correctly, but is easy to edit after vfiler creation/configuration. For example, if you use an ip alias or vlan, sometimes the commands are put above the vif creation. For example, the alias to vif10 is made before vif10 is created, so on boot the alias will fail. Also, it is important to add the route for the vfiler if needed “vfiler run route add default” in the rc file. Also, a lot of customers implement MultiStore after the system is already running…so we move the resources in vFiler0 to another vFiler that can be used for DR…in this case we often don’t want to initialize mirrors (vfiler dr configure will initialize mirrors even if initialized), but instead we just manually mirror the vfiler root volume created on the source, then create the dr vfiler manually, then resync it…saves the pain of re-init of a mirror.

Another cool thing… ONTAP 7.3.1 added one of the items on our wish list for the secure dr feature using ssl, so we don’t have to have rsh enabled for the controller to controller communication. “vfiler dr configure [-c secure]” 7.3.1 also put sis (dedup) commands in the vFiler context now too, so it’s configurable from within the vFiler itself now.

MultiStore Rocks

-Scott Gelb

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/2009/04/site-recovery-manager-its-not-just-for-vms.html

Cheers,
Vaughn

Actually, one real benefit to Qtrees is SnapMirror. Back when I used to deploy systems instead of just sell them, I would make the root of the flexvol empty and put in a single Qtree. Then I would build Qtree SnapMirror (QSM) relationships instead of Volume SnapMirrors (VSM). The benefit is that the volume sizes could be different and I could resize the volumes more easily than with VSM. Sure, there is a performance penalty, but in most of the environments I worked in the perf penalty was never felt and the easy flexibility was good to have in your pocket.

One small thing to add is that you can use qtrees instead of volumes for the vfiler root. That was a big deal back in the Data ONTAP 6.X days.

Good stuff as usual, Scott.

usbvtrisicr200> vfiler context usbvtcommonfiles
usbvtcommonfiles@usbvtrisicr200> Wed Apr 8 22:18:24 EDT [usbvtcommonfiles@cmds.vfiler.console.switch:notice]: Console context was switched to a vFiler(tm) unit usbvtcommonfiles.

usbvtcommonfiles@usbvtrisicr200>