I had two discussions about Data ONTAP 7-mode last week, which was a bit of a surprise, since it’s been something NetApp has been working to help customers get away from for.. some time now. 8 years really pushing it, 10 years since NetApp started providing Clustered ONTAP as an option.

You can totally understand it – data has GRAVITY. It’s heavy and hard to move. Those moves and cutovers need to be as seamless, or quick (or ideally both) as possible. And 7DOT was a platform people had a lot of experience with and understood, and change is difficult.

I’ve been in videos and given countless presentations how to do 7toC migrations quickly and easily, and done a LOT of them, either personally, or working with customers, but the end result is that some people haven’t done it, and it’s now 2023, and the remaining 7DOT users find themselves in a tough spot.

Last November, Microsoft made some AD changes, which means that to continue using 8.2.5P5 with Active Directory, you need to re-enable RC4 encryption. RC4 is.. not terribly secure, so I wouldn’t do that.

At the beginning of Feb 2023, NetApp stopped supporting the FAS255x and FAS80x0 controllers, which are the last generation to run 8.2.5, the last release of 7DOT, which itself is now in “self support”. Self support means NetApp won’t delete the webpages which help with troubleshooting. But once they’re gone in Jan 2026 (less than three years away.. and it can’t come soon enough), you’ll be stuck with some random university in Wollongong hosting an old copy..

ONTAP does everything 7DOT did except allow direct FC connections (because it requires NPIV for FC LIF hosting) and providing an FTP server. The first is an easy fix (buy an FC switch.. if you’re still running 7DOT, you’re probably not adverse to eBay purchases of infrastructure) and the second is a matter of setting up a small Linux VM somewhere if it’s a really big concern.

The best time to migrate off 7DOT was 2016. The second best time is now.

With ONTAP 9, there is now an “option 9” in the boot menu that allows you to re-initialise a system to/from ADP, like wipeconfig.

It is a three step process to wipe an HA pair – the first one, option 9a –  removes the existing partition information. And the second, option 9b, will repartition and re-initialise the system, and then finally on the node that was halted, boot it, then wipe it (option 4) from its boot menu.

*************************************************
* Advanced Drive Partitioning Boot Menu Options *
*************************************************
(9a) Unpartition disks and remove their ownership information.
(9b) Clean configuration and initialize node with partitioned disks.
(9c) Clean configuration and initialize node with whole disks.
(9d) Reboot the node.
(9e) Return to main boot menu.

The caveat is that one node has to be halted at the LOADER> prompt while you run the first two commands. That should be it!

LIFs, or logical interfaces, are the interfaces from outside world to the storage of a NetApp system. There is a many to one relationship of LIFs to ports. From the early days of Clustered ONTAP, NetApp has given advice to have one LIF per datastore on VMware. There are more general purpose use-cases for this as well.

But it’s not always worth it.

The justification for a 1:1 LIF to volume mapping has been to allow a volume to move between nodes, and to move the LIF to the other node, to avoid indirect access for longer than a few moments.

Indirect access is when IP traffic comes into one node (for example N1), while the volume is on another node (say N2 – but it could be on another HA pair in another cluster). This means the data is pulled off disk on N2, goes over the cluster interconnect switching network, and then out of N1. This adds front end latency, and increases congestion on the cluster network, which in turn can delay cluster operations.

So, it seems like a good idea, right? Ok, if you have three datastores for VMware, for example – there are minimal overheads for having three IPs. But then – if you only have three datastores, how likely are you to move 1/3rd of the VMs from one node to the other? So that’s an argument for not doing it. But with 7 datastores, it’s much more likely to come up, and still, 7 to 10 IPs isn’t too bad. But if you have 50 datastores, it’s probably more than two nodes, so putting them all in place, managing the mapping datastores to LIFs.. there’s a lot of overhead.

Let’s have a look at WHY you might move a volume:

1. Aggregate full – no more aggregates on original home node
2. Controller CPU/IO high – balance workloads to another controller
3. Equipment replacement – Moving off old equipment onto new equipment

In the third case, indirect access is ok, because it is temporary, so there’s no need for additional LIFs for that. For the other two cases, especially for VMware, there’s always the options of doing a storage vMotion to move all the VMs. For non VM workloads, it’s obviously going to be a different scenario – so the decision to weigh up is – how often do you as an admin think you’ll need to move only one or two volumes at a time? There is always an option of unmounting off a LIF on the source node and remounting from an IP on the destination.

So for my money – more than three datastores and less than ten, one LIF per datastore is probably fine. For anything else, I’d suggest just one NFS LIF per node (per SVM), and deal with preventing indirect access through other means. But I also don’t think it’s a “hard and fast” rule.

We have a customer with a pretty kick-ass ONTAP environment that we built up last year – dual sites, each with 2x FAS8040 HA pairs in a cluster. This year we added an HA pair of AFF8080s with 48 x 3.84TB SSDs to each site, which included an upgrade to ONTAP 8.3.2.

We’re in the process of migrating from older FAS3270s with ONTAP 8.2 for these guys – we did a bunch of migrations last year, and we started again this year. Depending on application, workloads, etc we have a number of different methods for migration, but we got caught out last week with some LUN migrations.

Turns out there is a new features in ONTAP 8.3, which is turned on by default for new and migrated LUNs – selected LUN mapping. SLM reduces host failover time by only announcing paths from the HA pair hosting the LUN. But it’s only turned on for new LUNs – existing ones still show all 12 paths (2 per node). This is a bit of an odd choice to my thinking – I think it should optional if the system is already in production.

So our excellent tech working on the project, thinking it was a bug, called NetApp Support – and spent way too long being told to upgrade HUK, DSM and MPIO. Needless to say.. this didn’t work. Kinda disappointing. I’m told there’s a magic phrase you can use – “I feel this call isn’t progressing fast enough, can you please transfer me to the duty manager?”. Has this ever worked for you? Let me know in the comments 😉

I have a FrankenFAS2240, made up out of parts from about 5 different systems, totally unsupported. I set it up initially with 12 drives, and then got some more and wanted to grow the ADP setup.

By default, putting these drives into the enclosure, they showed up as broken. The solution to this is from this NetApp Communities post  – once the drives are labelwiped and set to spare, they are automatically partitioned.

From there, it’s just a matter of running disk assign for the data partitions, zeroing them, then adding them! Easy!