Just wanted to share a few screens on what I’ve been labing up the past few days. After getting the ESX 4 host up, it provided the opportunity to install the clustered Data Ontap simulator 8.2R1, of which I created 4 nodes.
Ontap app for Splunk
Using OnCommand System Manager to configure 2 paths of iScsi to each of 4 cDot nodes.
The portset for the above specifies that all ports are visible. We could hide some paths from the storage perspective if we chose to do so.
I wanted to call out this post. The vsim for Data Ontap 8.2RC1 has recently came out and I was wanting to run it as a VM (several of them actually, on ESX) to simulate a 4-node cluster mode. The documentation says we need ESX 4.1 but I tried to spin it up in my ESX 5.1 environment anyway, figuring why not, since it is new.
Turns out it errors out with something about it not being able to find DataOntap-sim.vmdk, even though it is clearly in the same directly. On a hunch, I figured it was probably because of the ESX 4.1 requirement.
Well, 4.1 is kind of old news, but I had an extra host laying around, so I figured it to be a good idea to spin it up. Problem: CD Drive is broken and I do not have a PXE environment setup….even though it is also not supported in 4.1.
This brings me to the above mentioned post, and is why I make blog posts of my own of the things I run into, one day it may actually help someone as the above post did for me. It describes how to make a USB drive bootable and how to lay out the files from a 4.1 install image and what to modify. In fact, I remember hitting just about all the errors mentioned in that post. One note I can add is you must pay attention to the SYSLINUX version that ESX boots up with (mine was 4.03). You can not take, for instance, the SYSLINUX 5.0 menu.c32 & mboot.c32 and think it will magically work. You will still get the COM32 errors until you get the right version for what is on the boot media. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I know I made the mistake and probably will not be the last!
This is a thank you to the above posting, it saved me a lot of trouble getting 4.1 running again in my lab.
Most of the howto I’ve done here has been on the commandline. In an effort to be more balanced, we are going to go through some of the tasks we have done already and some new ones using the NetApp GUI System Manager. This is basically the replacement for FilerView for Data Ontap 8.1 and newer.
The installer is a smallish little pluging for your favorite browser (be sure to read the release notes for what is and is not supported). Java, everyone’s favorite program to turn a 486 into a 286, is also required. Here we are using 2.2R1, which is the latest version available on the NetApp website as of this post.
Install is pretty quick, and here is our launch screen.
Now we will add the cluster management ip of our cluster.
So, after updating ESXi from 5.0 to 5.1 U1, vSphere client to 5.1, vCenter to 5.1 (so I could then readd my 5.1 host back into vCenter), I then went to try again on a Windows 8 VM.
Now, we are getting this:
The fun never ends for those of us in IT 🙂
I remember reading something about a Synology bug with 5.1, but would have guessed it was fixed in 5.1 U1 since that is less than a month old at this point. Now its time to try it on a local datastore, or a non-Synology datastore and see if the problem persists.
