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Vaughn Stewart

Vaughn Stewart

Data Perspectives from Clouds to Analytics

Data ONTAP Edge Question: Run the VSA on Laptops?

September 11, 2012 by Vaughn Stewart 13 Comments

It seems many are having tremendous success with their evaluation of the NetApp Virtual Storage Appliance, Data ONTAP Edge. Two quick examples include Josh Odgers who authored a fantastic post detailing the provisioning and cloning capabilities of the NetApp VSC plug-in for vCenter and Mike Ellis who quickly spun up the VSA and began tweeting 98% storage savings when deduplicating 50 Windows VMs!

Josh VMike

Suffice to say, Edge introduces a new paradigm in terms of providing storage services and advanced data management with server hardware. Edge introduces an ability to innovate solutions that were previously thought of as unobtainable. Since it’s release I’ve received a number of emails containing out-of-this world solutions that are in the process of being developed on Data ONTAP Edge. I will share some as soon as I can – so stay tuned.

 

In the spirit of innovation

I have received emails from those seeking to run Edge on their laptops. Unfortunately Edge is designed to service data center workloads and as such the current release is specifically designed to run on VMware ESXi 5. I think many of us in the virtualization space are a bit spoiled with how often we can move a VM from ESXi to a laptop hypervisor like Fusion or Workstation; however, it seems this is not the case with Data ONTAP Edge.

In the spirit of innovation that surrounds edge I thought that it might be fun to see if any of the Edge eval users could make it run on a laptop. Sort of like a hack-a-thon. Note should anyone be able to pull it off the configuration would not be supported by NetApp; however, many may appreciate being able to extend the use of edge from ESXi on to their mobile platforms in order to meet a slew of new opportunities.

I wish I had time to jump into the lab and begin playing around. Alas my schedule doesn’t allow such play time. I have absolutely no idea if a ‘hack’ is as simple or for that matter even possible, but with that said who’s up for some fun?

The first person to post how to enable Edge to run on each of the VMware laptop platforms will gain riches beyond their dreams including international bragging rights, infamy throughout NetApp and as an added bonus they will receive an autographed copy of my new book, ‘Virtualization Changes Everything‘.

Book snipet

For those willing to take a stab at it, post your recipes in the comments section below & best of luck!

If you haven’t downloaded your copy of Data ONTAP Edge, you can do so here.

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Filed Under: NAS, Storage Virtualization, Tech Trends, VMFS, VMware, VSA

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. avatarAdam Bergh says

    September 11, 2012 at 6:58 pm

    I gave this a good shot. On boot of OnTap EDGE I can’t get past an I/O error “reading the CF card”.

    Not sure if this is even a task worth spending time on anyway. Why not just use the OnTap 8.1.1 simulator which runs just fine on Workstation and is completely free/unrestricted and has basically the same functionality as EDGE.

    Reply
    • avatargerard says

      April 19, 2014 at 6:18 am

      you believe there is a limitation to the size and performance to the disk

      Reply
  2. avatarTroy Bumpstead says

    September 11, 2012 at 8:09 pm

    Does running the VSA on top of a virtual ESXi5 host in Workstation8 count ?

    Reply
  3. avatarMichael Mills says

    September 11, 2012 at 9:10 pm

    I think I am close to getting it to work. What I need is the bootloader variable for the vsa.license. If someone could boot the VSA and hit a key to get into the bootloader. Then type show and that should show what the license should be set too (if it differs from what I think it should look like). In looking at the OVF, it lists the license key but when I put it in (setenv vsa.license “3F05-YZ01-0MI0-44H9-C7FC”) I am still getting Invalid/Missing license key on bootup.

    With that info I should be able to get it working (using Workstation 9 on Ubuntu 12.04 currently).

    – Mike

    Reply
    • avatarJason Goldschmidt says

      September 14, 2012 at 5:09 am

      Michael,

      vsa.license is not a bootarg. Rather it can be either an OVF property or a guestinfo variable.

      Take a look at the install process with ESX. You will notice that when the Data ONTAP Edge Eval VM is powered on, an ISO file is generated and attached to the VM. The ISO file is deleted when the VM is powered off. Mount this ISO file, you will find the OVF properties passed to the VM. This is what is known as an ISO-transport for OVF properties.

      Reply
      • avatarSean Luce says

        September 14, 2012 at 8:40 am

        Jason,

        I had the OVF transport figured out early on. I have created my own ISO with the ovf-env.xml doc. The VM reads this info and boots without issue. I am able to Ctrl-C and get in to maintenance mode, etc. The only issue I have now, is that Ontap doesn’t see any disks. The specific error message is:

        [localhost:scsi.cmd.checkCondition:debug]: Unknown device 0a.0:Check Condition: CDB 0xa0: Sense Data SCSI:illegal request – (0x5 – 0x20 0x0 0x0)(0).

        Also, the 0a.0 in the error message coordinates with whatever SCSI node I attach my 50GB data disk to. In the above case SCSI 0:0.

        Reply
        • avatarJason Goldschmidt says

          September 15, 2012 at 12:03 pm

          Sean,

          Do you know if Workstation/Fusion supports the equivalent of setting disk.EnableUUID = “TRUE” in your VMX file? I haven’t tracked down this error, but if the disk isn’t responding with page 80 or 83 INQUIRY data, then Data ONTAP won’t be able to recognize the disk.

          Just a thought. Good luck!

          BTW, your ovf-evn file looks good.

          Reply
          • avatarJason says

            September 17, 2012 at 8:26 am

            Sean,

            I’ve confirmed that if the VM is missing the disk.EnableUUID = “TRUE” setting in the VMX file, then the error message you reported is seen on an ESX based VM.

            Sep 17 16:23:29 [localhost:scsi.cmd.checkCondition:debug]: Disk device 0b.0: Check Condition: CDB 0x12: Sense Data SCSI:illegal request – (0x5 – 0x24 0x0 0x0)(0).
            Sep 17 16:23:29 [localhost:disk.init.failure.error:warning]: Disk 0b.0 failed initialization due to error 5.

            If it is supported by Workstation/Fusion, you will need to ensure that configuration parameter is set for the Data ONTAP Edge Eval VM.

            Thanks and happy hacking!

      • avatarSean Luce says

        September 14, 2012 at 8:43 am

        For what it’s worth, I can get to the same point by two methods:

        1. Creating the ISO with the ovf-env.xml file

        2. Standing up Ontap Edge first in a vSphere/ESXi environment, and then using VMware converter to convert the VM to a VMware workstation compatible VM.

        Here is my ovf-env.xml:

        VMware ESXi
        5.0.0
        VMware, Inc.
        en

        Reply
        • avatarSean Luce says

          September 14, 2012 at 8:48 am

          ovf-env.xml didn’t parse correctly…

          Copy here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l049zth5y03b6k5/d49e2dFL_9

          Reply
  4. avatarMike Ellis says

    September 11, 2012 at 11:50 pm

    Adam, I am going to figure it out before you, but you can have my book 🙂

    Reply
    • avatarAdam Bergh says

      September 12, 2012 at 6:06 am

      Thanks Mike, but I already have a copy!

      Reply
  5. avatarMike L says

    September 22, 2012 at 9:43 am

    For laptops/other VMware platforms, there’s always the Ontap Simulator..:

    https://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-1034

    Reply

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Vaughn Stewart

Vaughn Stewart

VP of Global Technology Alliances at Pure Storage.

Product strategy & technical story teller.

Imported from Detroit, refined in Silicon Valley.

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