Netapp Vaai Plugin Esxi 7.0 Download

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Thiscourse has played a pivotal role in my success. Yesterday I was offered the opportunity to work as a Technical Support Engineer for NetApp. Passing my NCDA was what really helped my career take off.

The other good thing is that VSC will continuously monitor those hosts, so if the settings get changed on one of them by accident somehow, it will alert you to that, and then you can fix the problem by pushing the settings back down again.

With the configuration, open the vSphere client, go to the Menu, then Virtual Storage Console, which will land on the overview page by default. On the overview page, click the second tab, Traditional Dashboard.

Native Snapshot copies for linked clones enable the creation of ONTAP FlexClone snapshot copies for linked clones rather than VMware snapshots. The ONTAP snapshots are better and more efficient. You want to be using them.

The first thing to do for the configuration is to check that VAAI is supported on the cluster. On VSC, go to Storage Systems, which will discover the cluster/s. If you expand that out, you can see the NFS VAAI is supported. It could be supported but not actually enabled.

To enable it, the first thing to do is to download the software. To go to the software downloads page on the NetApp website, go to mysupport.netapp.com and log in. Then go to Downloads, then Software, and that will bring you to the plugin page.

Check the latest version, click on View & Download. Scroll to the bottom of the page and Continue. You can also download the supporting documentation on that previous page, scroll to the bottom again, and accept the License Agreement.

Click on the Change link, and then browse to where you downloaded that extracted file, which is in the Downloads folder, and then vib20, and in the NetApp NAS plugin, and then double click on that VIB file there.

Now, you can go back again, browse, double-click the same file with the correct name, and then upload it. It will take a few seconds to see that the existing version is now populated. The hosts are still unavailable, so click the Refresh button, and the hosts should appear.

On the Host and Clusters page, expand the ESXi host, click on the VSC virtual machine, and then click on the green arrow to power that up. Leave that for about 15 minutes to ensure all the services are correctly started.

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The overall process to install NetApp VSC (Virtual Storage Controller) is simple and straight forward. The NetApp VSC includes in a single appliance the main VSC controller, the VASA Provider and also the plugin for the SRA component which works in conjunction with VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager).

Another nice feature supported from NetApp VSC is the NFS plugin for VAAI (VMware vStorage API for Array Integration). This plugin in fact allows to integrate with the VMware Virtual Disk Library running on the VMware vSphere Hosts. The VMware VAAI allows to offload certain common action directly to the storage controller without using resources (and traffic) from the VMware vCenter. This includes amongst the others tasks like thin provisioning, copying, cloning data blocks and more. In such cases all these operations are natively executed by the storage array.

At the time of writing the latest version of NetApp VSC supporting VMware 6.7u1 is version 7.2.1. This version also works with both the VMware vSphere Client (HTML5) and FLEX client (Adobe Flash). Whereas for the former this is only a technical preview in reality all the configuration is done from the latter. Probably next releases of the NetApp VSC will fully support the VMware vSphere Client as soon as the FLEX client is removed. Also it is strongly advised to deploy the VMware Tools as part of the process to install NetApp VSC. This is included as part of the NetApp VSC first setup as shown later in the article. Upon the NetApp VSC install, configuration and VASA Provider registration everything is ready to deploy and manage storage for the VMware virtual infrastructure.

On the first boot and before proceeding to install NetApp VSC the wizard executes a scripts which is checking if the VMware Tools is installed on the virtual appliance. Before moving to the next steps it is strongly advised to install the VMware Tools using the link from the vSphere Client or simply use the pertinent option from the Remote Console as per screenshot below.

At this point the internal script checks for the installation status and prompts for a reboot of the appliance to make the changes effective. During the process to install NetApp VSC it is recommended to leave the virtual appliance with 12 GB of Memory RAM. Same applies with in place upgrades to future versions.

In the meantime the plugin has been installed on the VMware vCenter and from the VMware vSphere Client it is possible to acces the plugin but as a technical preview only for this version of the Virtual Storage Controller.

Next step is to configure the VASA Provider. If the previous step is successful this will show the name of the vCenter in the drop down menu. It is actually possible to associate the same NetApp VSC to multiple vCenters.

Going back to the main console now the Virtual Storage Console will be populated with the available storage systems. This view can also be used for monitoring and configuration of various settings like NFS, MPIO (Multi-pathing IO) and more.

when adding new storage system it is possible to grant and/or revoke specific permissions like creation, discovery, modification and destruction of the existing datastores sitting on specific LUNs operated by NetApp ONTAP.

Next is to specify the name of the VMware vCenter responsible for the virtual infrastructure, the storage system (the NetApp VSC) and the available SVM (Storage Virtual Machine) with associated storage on NetApp ONTAP.

In the details view the option to specify the size along with if the thin of thick provisioning should be used when allocating the space for the datastore creation itself on the NetApp SVM. The Disk Aggregate to use and if part of an existing VMware datastore cluster.

This datastore is now created on a particular VMware Host. In reality as soon as the storage is created this can also be mounted also to the other Hosts part of the same vSphere Cluster or Data Center. Very useful for fail-over and vMotion scenarios.

Passionate about Virtualization, Storage, Data Availability and Software Defined Data Center technologies. The aim of Domalab.com is sharing with the Community the knowledge and experience gained with customers, industry leaders and like minded peers. Always open to constructive feedback and new challenges.

Hi David,

Thanks for your message. Not sure what is causing this issue. The latest VMware 6.7u2 should be supported by now.

First I would say make sure the NetApp version you are installing is fully supported for the VMware release you are running on. If you want to remove/install it again please refer to this article to have an idea: -netapp-vsc/

The NetApp forums are probably the best place to look for workarounds. Hope it helps.

Hi Damian,

Many thanks for your comment! Actually I have the entire list of screenshots for the series based on NetApp VSC 9.7 with upgrade to 9.7P2 ready. I hope to publish these next week. Lately has been really hectic and did some changes to the homelab too!

I will try to publish articles next week.

Kind Regards,

Michele

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