Storage plan - failback to specific cluster or datastore LIF

[stidedo]

Hi,

We are using VAO to failover Netapp snapmirrored datastores. 2 questions related to the failback scenario:

• Today it's not possible to define which LIF should be used to remount the datastore in the production vcenter (already checked with support). Now VAO is trying all LIF's and will use the first that works. It would we handy if we could define and/or if VAO saved the initial settings from before the failover. Some LIFs are customer specific and/or we want to use the home LIF assigned to a controller (to avoid traffic over interconnect link)

• We have 2 vsphere clusters in our production vcenter. Is it possible to define a specific cluster in the orchestration failback plan? VM's that ran on the more performant cluster should be re-added to this same cluster after the failback plan. Today it seems this is not possible? Am I correct?

If both are not possible and/or no workarounds. Can this been added as a feature request in the next version?

Regards,
Stijn

[Alec King]

Hello Stijn,

You are correct with the way VAO works currently in v3.
I've discussed your suggestion with development team and although there is some complexity there, it is possible.
And in product management terms the feature makes sense.

So I'm glad to announce that we have placed this task in our roadmap!

Some additional research is required, and of course development and QA testing. However we are planning it for a future release. I will post updates here with progress.

Thank you for the feedback!

[stidedo]

Thanks Alec!

[stidedo]

Hi Alec,

Is the above FR already part of v4 that was released?
Are there other specific Netapp features/improvements in v4 or is this version mainly focused on CDP integration?

Thanks.
Stijn

[Alec King]

Hello Stijn,

I'm afraid your FR is not in v4 - even "Veeam Speed" is not quite that fast

However your FR is in the plan for version 5 - and in fact it's already in development! Hopefully you will see it later this year.

Back to v4, and you are correct, the headline feature is support for Veeam B&R v11 CDP replicas.
However for NetApp we have confirmed support for ONTAP v9.8, as well as some internal refactoring and stabilisation of the Storage Plans.
There are also general improvements such as improved logic for restarting halted plans, and optimisation of reports (to remove white space and reduce page count).

So in general I would usually recommend upgrading to the latest and greatest!

Cheers,
Alec

[stidedo]

Hi Alec,

In the release notes of v5 I don't find much info about changes related to storage plans and Netapp integration. Can you share some more details here?
Is this integrated in the v5 release?

However your FR is in the plan for version 5 - and in fact it's already in development! Hopefully you will see it later this year.

Regards,
Stijn

[Alec King]

Hi Stijn,

Unfortunately we were not able to squeeze that feature into the release. There are some complexities in the logic - and of course many test scenarios for QA. We had a huge focus on the HPE Primera integration for v5, so unfortunately we had to push this feature to a future version.

However your feature request is in active development. We will ship it in some upcoming release (but I can't promise any specific version, sorry!)

In any case, I hope you are able to schedule your upgrade to VDRO v5 - there are still some cool new features you can use such as the updated Dashboard and new Inventory view. Any questions let us know.

Thanks!