NET701 Netapp Lab - part 1 (2/2)

Here's my continuation of the NetApp lab.

Exercise 4

Before I could start this exercise, I noticed that my lab environment had been reset, and I couldn't connect to my lab cluster! Because the lab environment was broken, I submitted a support ticket to see if NetApp could fix my issue quickly. Meanwhile, I decided to start the Basic NetApp Configuration and Administration Part 2 Self-Paced Lab.

After coming back a while later, the cluster was accessible and I could continue with the lab.

The purpose of this exercise is to teach me how to manage aggregates using the different interfaces.

Firstly, I learned the two methods of creating an aggregate.

The first method was with the OnCommand GUI. I didn't have any difficulties.

Here is the resulting aggregate 'aggr1':

The other method was to use CLI. This method requires you to remember the commands, but if you know the commands it is much faster because you don't need to navigate any menus and wizards. All it takes is one command.

Here is the command and it's output:

After creating aggregates, I had to delete and aggregate using the CLI. This involved making a test aggregate, then using a couple of simple commands to take it offline then delete it.

Exercise 5

The purpose of this exercise was to teach me how to create and manage SVMs

Tasks 1-4

The first 4 tasks involved creating and configuring the SVM. Doing this on the OnCommand GUI is a fairly easy process. All I had to do was go through the wizard and enter the provided details.

Here is the result from the wizard:

Task 5 

In this task I had to create host records for the LIFs created for the SVM

Here is a screenshot of the list of records

 

Exercise 6

Tasks 1-2

These tasks required me to create a set of volumes called vol1, project_y, project_z, and teams.

Here is a screenshot showing the created volumes:

Task 3

For this task I had to reorganise where the volumes were located in the namespace. This is useful because assigned permissions lower in the namespace can propagate down the namespace structure rather than having to assign permissions to each individual volume.

Here is the completed reorganisation:

Exercise 7

This exercise focuses on how to share volumes with Windows clients by using CIFS shares.

It is a simple process that involves creating a share and pointing to a volume. It must be noted that if I share a volume that has other volumes under it in the namespace, those volumes will be accessible within the share as additional directories.

Different shares have their own permissions which means different shares to the same volume or volumes within a volume can be used to control access to the volumes. As the screenshot below displays, the share that has read-only permissions cannot have its contents modified by any user unless they use a higher privilege share.

Exercise 8

This exercise involves exporting volumes to UNIX clients using NFS.

This process is a little more involved than creating a CIFS share as you have to do things like mapping the users from Windows to UNIX.

Here are screenshots of the results in the CentOS cmd showing the exports in use:

Blog Summary

Looking at how this blog went, I didn't really have any issues apart from the initial disappearance of the cluster. I'm still unsure as to whether I am putting the right amount of detail into this, or if I am putting in too much. In all honesty I find it very difficult to fully focus on the labs while blogging because I have to juggle the lab guide, the lab environment window, the screenshotting tool, and this blog. I will have to see how I get on, but at this stage I am finding it very time consuming vs just focusing on the lab purely.