NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for vSphere

Originally posted at http://mtellin.com/2009/11/03/netapp-virtual-storage-console-vsc-for-vsphere/

NetApp released v1.0 of their VSC for VMware vSphere, VSC is a plugin for vCenter which allows anyone connecting with the VI Client to access it.  What is nice about the tool is it allows you to see an overview of your storage environment and ensure things are configured inline with NetApp’s recommended best practices and, if they aren’t, allows you to set the recommended values.

Click on the pictures for a larger view, you can see it adds a new tab called NetApp when the ESX server is selected.  In my environment we are using all NFS for storage to the ESX boxes, so in the next screen I show the ‘Storage Details – NAS’ option:

What is nice about this view is I can quickly see I need to make a couple changes on the NetApp, the ucode settings should be set to on and the atime update should be set to on as well.

As mentioned before, there are also ESX specific settings that should be set to follow best practices, by right clicking on the ESX hosts listed in the NetApp tab (see 1st picture) there is an option to ‘Set Recommended Values’

Finally you can also set guest timeout settings, under the Tools option there is a download link for the .iso for Windows and Linux guests.  For some reason in my environment I couldn’t download the ISO from this page – if you have the same issue you can find it in the Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\webapps\public folder.

Once you load the ISO in the VM, double clicking on the CD drive will ask you if you want to add the info in the windows_gos_timeout.reg file to the registry.

While I only have NFS mounted storage, you can also use the VSC to check things like:

• Storage adapter timeout settings
• Multipathing settings
• Collecting diag info from fibre channel switches (or ESX hosts/NetApp controllers)

Also remember to check NetApp TR-3749 for best practices with NetApp and VMware vSphere.

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