netapp clustered data ontap 8.2 system administration

Muhammed H

Hi! My company is going to send some of us for netapp clustered data ontap 8.2 system administration training next month. And my line manager asked me if I am interested for this training. I just want to know any of you ever attended for that training? How useful it will be for someone who mainly works with Backup (Netbackup), windows servers and vmware?

JasminLandry

I've been using NetApp for more than a year now and I sure wish I had attended training prior to using it. I learned on the fly which is ok but it took me a while before I really understood the technology behind it.

kriscamaro68

I haven't taken any training on it but I was tasked with being the NetApp engineer just a few weeks ago. We are currently on 7-mode with the current system and moving to cdot on the new heads we bought. If you look at cdot from a virtual standpoint its not to bad. You have your SVM's (storage virtual machines) that act as the virtual filer or like it is its own head. From the SVM you can have many volumes or just a few attached.

The biggest problem I see from an admin standpoint is all the network BS involved now. With 7-mode you just had the various physical interfaces and you could create a vif (virtual interface) and be done. Now they want a lif (logical interface) for all kinds of crap or atleast that is what it seems like. I haven't really got to deep into the network side so maybe its not that way but sure seems like it.

There are lots of cool things with cdot that I am excited for over 7-mode. The one annoying thing is they limit your raid group size in both OS's and I hate that. I would like to make bigger raid groups that 28 disks so I don't lose so much space to the raid-dp (raid dual parity). There is a ton more for me to learn but I enjoy storage and virtualization. Being over both at my work gives me a really good understanding of the entire infrastructure.

Acrux

Muhammed H wrote: »

Hi! My company is going to send some of us for netapp clustered data ontap 8.2 system administration training next month. And my line manager asked me if I am interested for this training. I just want to know any of you ever attended for that training? How useful it will be for someone who mainly works with Backup (Netbackup), windows servers and vmware?

I know this is a little late, but whomever suggested 8.2.x training shouldn't have. NetApp is in the 8.3.x train (has been there since last year) and soon 8.4.x train. There are actually some big differences from 8.2.x to 8.3.x. Even the NCDA certification has moved to 8.3 material and has little to no 8.2 coverage.

My advice would be download the Simulators to play around, you can have full functionality of all protocols and licenses.

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

I haven't taken any training on it but I was tasked with being the NetApp engineer just a few weeks ago. We are currently on 7-mode with the current system and moving to cdot on the new heads we bought. If you look at cdot from a virtual standpoint its not to bad. You have your SVM's (storage virtual machines) that act as the virtual filer or like it is its own head. From the SVM you can have many volumes or just a few attached.

The biggest problem I see from an admin standpoint is all the network BS involved now. With 7-mode you just had the various physical interfaces and you could create a vif (virtual interface) and be done. Now they want a lif (logical interface) for all kinds of crap or atleast that is what it seems like. I haven't really got to deep into the network side so maybe its not that way but sure seems like it.

There are lots of cool things with cdot that I am excited for over 7-mode. The one annoying thing is they limit your raid group size in both OS's and I hate that. I would like to make bigger raid groups that 28 disks so I don't lose so much space to the raid-dp (raid dual parity). There is a ton more for me to learn but I enjoy storage and virtualization. Being over both at my work gives me a really good understanding of the entire infrastructure.

What controllers are you using, if you're in the entry level you can setup to use ADP (Advanced Drive Partitioning)
NetApp DataONTAP 8.3 | ADP Root Disk- - has a good explanation of this

All the networking stuff is there to make life easier if you need to slice things up accordingly. Their university online has some good videos that encompass showing this if you have time to watch them.

The best things about CDOT over 7Mode are the simple things like ... tab auto complete.. and in 8.3 the system manager no longer needs java to be installed, its built into the controller.. again.

Note: Really make sure you have a plan on the data migration from your 7M to CDOT environment. The 7MTT tool works, however if you take this time to re-do the structure it then derails. It's pretty much a 1 to 1 move and you can't re-structure anything. That said there is a newer revision out that I haven't used yet so I don't know what all changes have been made, I know my SE said that it was greatly improved upon.