Last week NetApp released version 2.0 of it's Virtual Storage Console plug-in for vCenter. You can download VSC 2.0 from now.netapp.com. To install VSC 2.0, you have to uninstall version 1.0. What I don't like about this method is that vCenter can't find the plug-in named Virtual Storage Console from version 1.0 and you end up with this nasty red ! telling you there is an error. Can we clean-up the old one first? During the install of VSC 2.0 make sure you click on the "Provisioning and Cloning" check box to install the provisioning tools. If you have the license for "Backup and Recovery" you can install those components as well to do VM level Backups. No longer are you subject to taking snapshots of a full LUN or datastore, this allows you to do it on a VM-by-VM basis, but you have to purchase the license. I just like how it is all nicely integrated with vCenter now. After installing VSC 2.0, you have to register the plug-in and enable the plug-in in your vSphere client. Now that the install is finished, it's time to look at the gravy.
NetApp did a much better job grabbing stats to display within vCenter. You can click on any datastore to see how much storage has been used, your de-duplication ratio and more. With a click of a button you can deploy all the recommended HBA, MPIO, and NFS Advanced Settings to optimize your storage environment.
Next we will add our storage controllers to the vCenter plug-in for Provisioning. Go to the Home screen on your vSphere client and click the NetApp icon in the Solutions and Applications section. Click on the "Provisioning and Cloning", click on "Storage Controllers", and click on "Add...". Enter the Hostname/IP and credentials and click Next. Follow the screens until you are done. Do this for each storage controller.
Now that all your storage controllers have been added, it's time to deploy a datastore. If you want to deploy a datastore to all the Hosts within at a cluster, right click at the Cluster level. If you want to deploy a datastore to a single ESX(i) host, right click on a single ESX(i) host. Find the "NetApp" menu and click on "Provision Datastore". Follow the wizard to create any NFS, iSCSI, or FC datastore. It will automatically populate all ESX hosts with the datastore if you did it at the cluster level.
Great, now you have a newly provisioned datastore. But what does it look like on the backend?
Provisioning storage does a great job on the back end with the naming convention. You can easily see what was created. It also takes into account the correct permissions needed for ESX(i) only access. Remember, if you delete the NFS storage from the ESX host within vCenter, it doesn't destroy the volume on the back end. To completely destroy the volume, use NetApp System Manager or FilerView.