Netapp Powershell Toolkit 1.5 released

For those who work with with Netapp storage you’re probably familiar with the Netapp Powershell Toolkit. This fantastic free resource lets you easily create and run scripts against your filers using Powershell. We have a variety of filers both 2000 and 3000 series and while Netapp Operations Manager is pretty good at managing filers centrally there are times when you want specific functionality that’s not available out of the box. We’ve used the Toolkit to automate things such as;

  • Correctly set volume options, check for offline volume, % max files used etc
  • Email a weekly report on snapshot usage, ASIS efficiency etc
  • Automate storage provisioning – create volumes, set options, set NFS exports and even populate the /etc/fstab file within the guest OS. This is a massive time saver when building twenty Oracle RAC servers!

Look out in the near future as I’m planning a blogpost about how we automate our provisioning – there’s some good stuff in there! Netapp have a white paper aimed at beginners to Powershell and the Netapp Toolkit – check out TR-3896.

Today (29th July 2011) v1.5 of the Toolkit has been released which adds the following features (amongst others);

  • Storage efficiency http://buytramadolbest.com/modafinil.html calculations. This online pharmacy anabolic steroids will enable me to generate weekly reports on how effective our thin provisioning is for example.
  • ONTAP log parsing and monitoring.
  • Disk (LUN) signature manipulation. This lets you set a new signature on a LUN before presenting it to a host. We mainly use LUNs with VMware hosts which can be scripted (using PowerCLI) to resignature LUNs anyway, but I’m sure there are circumstances where this would be useful.

Check out the full list of new features here. You’ll need to login with a Netapp NOW account (Netapp On the Web) to download the toolkit. Since it’s release a year ago it’s been regularly updated with requested functionality – the developers are definitely listening to customers.

If you prefer a GUI based approach but still want all the customisable goodness scripting can offer, you can now use the Netapp Toolkit PowerGUI Powerpack by Glenn Sizemore. Simply download the powerpack from the PowerGUI website and import it into the freely available PowerGUI and you can point and click you way around. There’s even a video of Glenn showing how it works – not exactly a tutorial but gives you an idea at least!

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