Well time for my first post of 2017, I had such good plans for Christmas, produce some blog posts, reply to some emails and get some studying done. Well you guessed it, nothing much achieved over the Christmas period. In my defence I was in the office for two of the three days so I only really had a couple of long weekends.
However some small steps were made, I did reply to all the comments made on the blog, I did spend some time going through my mailbox and I have started some studying but that’s another blog post.
In going through my mailbox I found an excellent resource on Netapp and other Storage that I don’t know why I didn’t publish its existence sooner.
I had an email from a new blogger Neil Anderson who wanted to make me aware of his blog at www.flackbox.com where you can find lots of NetApp material and even a free course on San and NAS storage. But then his biggest achievement is he’s written a free eBook on How to Build a NetApp ONTAP 9 Lab… For Free!
Let me just put that in perspective: he’s put together a 117 page eBook that will teach you how to build a fully virtualized storage lab. It features a couple of NetApp ONTAP9 clusters, plus Windows and Linux clients, and is networked using a VyOS router. The best thing about it is you can put it together and run it on your laptop completely for free.
The detailed step by step walkthrough points you to where to download all of the required software and shows you how to handle the configuration of all components. Critical (but little documented) adaptations such as adding virtual SSD drives and extra storage space are also covered.
The lab supports most of the features you’d encounter in a production setting. You’ll be prepared to implement iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, storage Thin Provisioning, Deduplication and Compression, Snapshots, and FlexClone among others, and exercise the replication technologies SnapMirror and SnapVault.
The blog is frequently updated with new NetApp training videos which teach you how to configure the features in the lab.
So I suggest that if you’re interested in all things NetApp you go and take a look sometime.
