After figuring out the SnapVault stuff, I needed to implement a whole bunch of SnapMirror relations. As I am lazy (as in click-lazy), I ended up writing a somewhat short Bash script, that’ll either establish a bunch of SnapMirror relations (for a single host) or just for a single volume.
The script expects, that SSH public key authentification has been set up, and that the source for the SnapMirror exists and is online/not-restricted.
As I wrote before, we have a bunch of filers (and a ton of volumes w/ luns on them), that I need to monitor. At first, I tried the existing NetApp Nagios-Plugin(s), but they all use SNMP and with that I can either watch all volumes or none. And that didn’t satisfy me.
Don’t get me wrong, the existing plugins are okay and I still use them for stuff (like GLOBALSTATUS or FAN/CPU/POWER) which isn’t present in the API or real hard to get at, however I wanted more. So I ended up looking at the NetApp API, and ended up writing a “short” plugin for Nagios using Perl.
Maybe if I’m ever bored, I’ll rewrite it using C, but for now the Perl plugin has to suffice.
So far the plugin supports the following things:
The plugin will return performance data for most (if not all) of those classes. It needs a user on the filer you wish to monitor – which sadly needs to have the admin role.
Well, I recently had the pleasant task of implementing SnapVault backups, that are being shipped to an offsite location with SnapMirror.
That in itself isn’t the bad thing, however we decided against Protection Manager (since it was a charged product back when we decided on this). So I basically had the three tasks:
Well, two months later (sadly it still has some kinks – I can’t figure out this one bug though for the life of it) and a few hundred hours of working on/with it and out came four things:
I’ll post those things one after another, once I wrote up all the articles.
Well, we’ve been trying to come up with a decent way to backup NetApp snapshots to tape (SnapMirror To Tape), so we evaluated all the available methods of using NDMP backups.
So the Image Backup is one of the ways. However the DIFFerntial backup only works for CIFS and NFS shares (which we don’t use). We only have FC luns (or rather FCoE luns), so there’s only a single (or in case of the boot luns more than one) file in each volume. With that however, each run of the Image Backup with the DIFFerential option, it’s gonna backup the full size of the volume (plus the deduplicated amount).
The SnapMirror To Tape option presents another problem: We intend to use SnapManager for SQL/Oracle, which creates “consistent” snapshots of the database luns. However the SnapMirror To Tape backup doesn’t have an option to use an already existing snapshot, but creates another one. Which puts the whole SnapManager business down the curb. So we either do use a SnapMirror To Disk from one database lun to another controller and then run the SnapMirror To Tape from the second controller or come up with another way to back them up to TSM.