NetApp H610S Fan speed too high – controlling with IPMI

I was chatting with someone on the NetApp Discord today – they’d just bought a used NetApp H610S aka NAF-1703 aka Quanta D52B-1U, and installed Proxmox on it, but the fans were running too high. This was a WAF issue, and they were looking for a way to calm it down.

We did some digging and found this document on the IPMI commands for a similar platform – but they didn’t work on this one.

Some digging around suggested that they needed to use

ipmitool raw 0x30 0x39 0x00 0x00

instead of

ipmitool raw 0x30 0x39 0x01 0x00

What’s the difference? Who knows, but it worked.

Hope this helps someone!

7 Mode? In this economy?

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.

How to wipe a partitioned ADP NetApp system

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!

ONTAP – Why and why not to have one LIF per NFS volume

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.

Selective LUN Mapping on ONTAP 8.3

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 😉

What can I do with my old NetApp hardware?

I had a chance today to go through some equipment in my lab pool and try some things I’d been thinking about for a while.

  • Q: If you pull the CF card out of a FAS30xx or FAS31xx system and put it in a PC, does it boot?
  • A: Yes, kind of. It’s a standard FAT16 card, with a standard boot loader on it. However, there is no console, so it just boots up with a flashing cursor, but plug your serial cable into your PC’s serial port and you can interact with it. I tried it in a USB CF reader, and all the kernel boot options refer to IDE devices. With an older system and an IDE to CF header, it might go further, but ONTAP’s boot process has platform checks, so it will probably fail at that point
LOADER> printenv

Variable Name        Value
-------------------- --------------------------------------------------
CPU_NUM_CORES        2
BOOT_CONSOLE         uart0a
BIOS_VERSION         1.3.0
BIOS_DATE            06/22/2010
SYS_MODEL            Vostro 220 Series
SYS_REV              �P�(
SYS_SERIAL_NUM       C384SK1
MOBO_MODEL           0P301D
MOBO_REV             A02
MOBO_SERIAL_NUM      ..CN7360495H03W1.
CPU_SPEED            3000
CPU_TYPE             Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E8400  @ 3.00GHz
savenv               saveenv
ENV_VERSION          1
BIOS_INTERFACE       86A0
LOADER_VERSION       1.6.1
ARCH                 x86_64
BOARDNAME            Eaglelake
  • Q: Can I use a DS14MK2/DS14MK4/EXN2000 with Linux?
  • A: Yes! Plenty of people have done it. For FC devices, there is a problem of 520 byte sectors, but for SATA(ATA) devices, the use 512 byte ones natively, so no problem. Use a PCI or PCIe FC card like the LPE11002 ($10 on ebay), then install sg3-utils (ubuntu, check your distro for its name there), and use “sg_format -s 512” on any FC drives to convert them from 520 byte sectors to 512 byte sectors, then use the device like any other.

 

  • Q: What about DS4243/DS4246/DS2246 shelves with Linux?
  • A: This one I’m less sure of – but it seems like it should work. I got pretty close. They are just SAS expanders. I have put a NetApp X2065 PCIe SAS HBA into a Linux system, and it is recognised as a PMC8001 SAS HBA. Plugging the shelf in (single attachment) results in the drives being recognised (same 520 byte problem for SAS drives though). Was able to create a LVM PV on a couple of SATA drives, put it into a VG, and then create an LV, but when I tried formatting the LV, it failed when it got the stage of writing superblocks. It’s probably fixable, but I don’t have the time or need to do so. It is also worth mentioning that the PMC8001 is made for rack mount systems with high airflow – inside a standard PC it gets VERY VERY hot, very quickly.
  • Update: 2017-08 – I had someone email me about this, and Youtube mysteriously suggested this video on this very topic. After some back and forth, it looks like the trick to getting it working is to pull out the second IOM from the back of the system and single attach it. This may only be needed for SATA drives with the interposer board that makes them talk SAS. I know some people who have got the DS2246 with SAS drives working without having to do this.

 

  • Q: What happens if I put a FlashCache (PAM II 512GB) card into a PC?
  • A: Nothing. Linux detects the PCI vendor ID as NetApp, but then doesn’t assign a class, and just says product ID of 774c.

 

  • Q: What if I install Linux on a CF card, then put it into a FAS3170?
  • A: Stay tuned 😉 Standard ubuntu-core won’t fit onto the 1GB supplied CF card. I’m in the process of acquiring a larger one, and I’ll try.

Adding more disks to an ADP NetApp

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!

Re-ordering shelves for NetApp FAS

No-one is perfect. I recently added some shelves to the wrong location of a stack, breaking the design rule of a single speed transition between 3G and 6G shelves, and didn’t find out until after the new disks were added to an existing aggregate. Under normal circumstances, you can officially hot remove disk shelves from a system running ONTAP 8.2.1 or later. Assuming they don’t have data on them, which these ones did.

Fortunately ONTAP doesn’t require symmetric SAS topologies, so I did the following to resolve it:

  1. Aim to recable the IOM B stack
  2. Failover and take node 2 out of service
  3. Disconnect SAS cable from node 1 (yes, node 1) to IOM B
  4. Recable IOM B’s SAS stack
  5. Disconnect node 2’s connection to the IOM A stack
  6. Bring up node 2, failback
  7. At this point, node 1 and node 2 have different, non redundant topologies
  8. Failover node 1 to node 2
  9. Recable IOM A stack
  10. Reconnect redundant connections for IOM A and IOM B to bring node 2 back into MPHA
  11. Failback to node 1

Tada, all done, non-disruptive (system is iSCSI only – CIFS without SMB3 Continuous Availablity would result in session disconnects)

I am become death, destroyer of SANs

Most people want their SAN to keep data around, with maximum resiliency. But what do you do at the end of their lives?

From time to time I get called in to do the opposite of what most people care about from SANs – destroying them. ONTAP has built in sanitization options, which perform a combination of overwrites and zeroing of drives, to enable you to securely erase the drives, and with some NetApp models, like the FAS2240 and FAS255x’s, you can convert them into disk shelves.

Sanitizing all the drives in a controller is usually a two step process – you destroy the existing aggregates, create a new basic system on a small aggregate, then run sanitize on the remaining disks, then repeat, erasing the ones used for the root volume while you’re running the first sanitize.

But there’s an easier way – disable cf, offline all the volumes except vol0, take the system down, boot to maintenance mode, destroy all the aggregates, then reassign all the drives to one controller, and create a two disk RAID4 aggregate using the two drives that were the spares from each controller previously – they won’t have had data on them, so usually no need to sanitize. Boot into ONTAP and run through the initial setup wizard (there’s a bit of hand waving here about the exact process, as it differs between 7.x and 8.x), run the sanitize, and you’re done in a single step.

To do a shelf conversion without a sanitize, similar plan – offline volumes, disable cf, boot to maintenance mode, take ownership of all the drives (using disk reassign to reassign them from their partner), then destroy the aggregates, then remove ownership from all drives and shut the system down. Then, swap the PCM/IOMEs out for real IOMs, and attach as a new shelf. The new system will need to zero the spares before you can use the drives, and it is usually half the speed of doing it from option 4 in the special boot menu (which makes it about 17 hours for 3TB SATA), but the waiting game is all part of systems administration 😉

ONTAP 8.3 – Disk Assignment policy

ONTAP 8.3 further refines how and when disks are automatically assigned. There are now 4 options for the disk auto-assignment policy – bay, shelf, stack and default. For heavy reading, check out the ONTAP 8.3 Physical Storage Management guide.

If “bay” is chosen, disks in odd-number bays are assigned to the same controller, and disks in even numbered bays are assigned to the same controller. If “stack” is chosen, all drives in the same stack are assigned to the same controller, and if “shelf” is chosen, all drives in the same shelf are assigned to the same controller.

Default is an interesting one – on the FAS22xx and FAS25xx, it means “bay”, on everything else, it means “stack”. If you have a single stack on an 8020? Well, you’ll need to manually set the policy to “shelf”.