Changing NetApp storage policies from non-ALUA to

ALUA
My latest customer was still running on VMware ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 and asked me
to upgrade their environment. Their whole environment was running on NetApp storage and Ior
ESX there is a change in the Storage Array Type Policy (SATP) and the Path Selection Policy
(PSP) when moving Irom ESX 3.5 to 4.1.
Very Iirst step is oI course the upgrade (actually I did a reinstall) oI Virtual Center to vCenter
4.1, Iollowed by a Iresh install oI the ESX hosts. I switched Irom ESX 3.5 boot Irom SAN, to
ESXi 4.1 booting Irom USB sticks. When all your VMs are running on the Ireshly installed ESXi
4.1 hosts, your storage policy is your next concern.
Storage policy
According to NetApp documentation and VMware HCL, the preIerred policy Ior ESXi 4.1 hosts
connected to NetApp FAS3020, is using ALUA with a Round Robin policy. Normally I would
have made sure that right aIter installation the correct storage policy was set. However, in the
storage design that was already present, there is one big volume dedicated to VMware and that
volume holds a number oI LUNs that are presented to the ESX hosts. This volume has a one to
one mapping to the ESX iGroup. On NetApp ALUA can only be activated at iGroup level, which
means ALUA is activated Ior all the LUNs at once. Would I have enabled ALUA right aIter the
Iirst host was running ESXi 4.1, all the ESX 3.5 hosts (pending upgrade) would also have
received the ALUA policy. Since I could not Iind Iirm conIirmation that this would or would not
be an issue and the consultant supporting their NetApp environment said to not enable ALUA Ior
the 3.5 hosts, I decided to switch to ALUA aIter all hosts were running ESXi 4.1.
Virtual Storage Console
For earlier versions oI ESX, NetApp has built the ESX Host Utilities Kit. This was an agent that
would be installed in the console. For ESXi 4.1 there now is the Virtual Storage Console 2.0 that
only needs to be installed on the vCenter Server and not on the hosts itselI. AIter install it is then
immediately available Ior all VI Clients by clicking the NetApp tab in the VI Client.
Through the Virtual Storage Console an admin can quickly see iI the storage policies Ior the
hosts have been set correctly. See image below:

In the above example you see that Ior example Ior the Iirst host the adapter settings, MPIO
settings and NFS settings are not set correctly. Instead oI switching to your host and setting the
correct policy Ior each LUN on each host, you can now click on the host in the Virtual Storage
Console and have the correct settings applied automatically.

Some GUI problems in the Virtual Storage Console
Although the Virtual Storage Console is a very handy tool, I did have some problems with it.
Luckily these are only GUI problems and the storage was running Iine all the time. The problems
I ran into was that the GUI is very slow. Clicking on any oI the status alerts and asking Ior more
details takes Iorever. Actually, it is so slow; I receive at least two warnings by Internet Explorer
each time, asking me iI I want to continue because the script is no longer responding:

AIter the page is Iinished, a Iull report is presented in which you have to search Ior the inIo you
are looking Ior, which makes it unclear what the real issue is. Biggest problem here is that in the
report some values are colored green and some are red to indicate a problem. Since a lot oI
people (mostly men, including) have some Iorm oI color blindness, it is diIIicult to see what is
green and what is in red.

Dear NetApp, please change this. It would be great to just quickly get an error report, but also
get an extensive report like the one above. But scrolling through all these lines every time again
and waiting Ior the report to be generated isn`t what I`m looking Ior. Also change warnings or
alerts into an exclamation sign.
Let`s get to work
Now let`s see how the change was perIormed. I started with the whole cluster oI ESXi hosts
connected to 9 datastores, each datastore connected to one LUN, all part oI just one volume. On
all hosts ESXi the storage array type policy (SATP) was automatically detected by ESXi and set
to VMWSATPDEFAULTAA with a 'Fixed (VMware) path selection policy (PSP).

All VMs are running and the change will be perIormed without downtime to the VMs, but
because I wasn`t sure iI this process would be 100 error Iree, I decided to perIorm the change
outside oIIice hours.
To perIorm the change, I Iollowed the blogpost Nick Triantos wrote with some minor changes:
Check Version
First I made sure I was running a supported ONTAP version, such as any version above 7.3.1.
Logged on the NetApp console using SSH and ran the Iollowing command:
version
Enable ALUA
Next step was to enable ALUA on the ESX iGroups on each NetApp controller. First make sure
what the current setting oI that iGroup is, then enable ALUA and again check the current setting.
I ran the Iollowing commands:
igroup show -v <group
igroup set <group alua yes
igroup show -v <group
AIter ALUA is enabled I received this output:
<group (FCP):
JS Type: vmware
Member: 21:00:00:1b:32:10:27:3d (logged in on: vtic, 0b)
Member: 21:01:00:1b:32:30:27:3d (logged in on: vtic, 0a)
ALUA: 08
Reboot
This is where I stopped Iollowing the guide Irom Nick. The NetApp Iiler now reports that ALUA
is enabled to the ESXi hosts, but this will only be detected by ESXi aIter a reboot. To reboot the
ESXi host, I set it to maintenance mode, rebooted it and checked iI the host had now switched to
VMWSATPALUA.

4 Set the Path Selection Policy (PSP)
ou might have noticed that although the host has now switched the SATP to
VMWSATPALUA, the Path Selection Policy is still at 'Most Recently Used (VMware),
which isn`t what I was aiming Ior. Round Robin is what I want. To make this change, I switched
to the NetApp tab in the VIC client (Virtual Storage Console) and click on the host you`re
working on. Now click and select 'Set recommended values. In the next screen select the
desired settings to be applied:

I selected all three options and waited Ior the change to complete. In the NetApp logging you can
see the settings being applied:

AIter these settings had been applied, a reboot oI the host was done again.
Check the path selection policy
AIter reboot, I checked to see iI the Path Selection Policy was now correctly set. I also checked
the Virtual Storage Console Ior warnings. The update oI this view can sometimes some minutes,
even aIter you clicked 'update in the upper right corner.

AIter the settings Ior the ESXi host were correct, I proceeded to the next host. In some situations
a warning remained about 'Reboot pending when checking the Virtual Storage Console, but I
just went ahead. Eventually all warnings cleared automatically without Iurther intervention.