Ace Your NS0-521 NCIE SAN ONTAP Exam

Active IQ OneCollect is a NetApp tool designed to collect configuration and performance data from your storage environment, including SAN solutions. It can automate the creation of difference reports by capturing the current state of the system and comparing it against a baseline, thereby showing any changes or deviations from the intended design.

For further details, refer to:

NetApp Active IQ OneCollect Documentation

When the number of paths exceeds the recommended configuration for SAN deployment, it can cause performance issues. To address this problem, you can:

Use Selective LUN Mapping (SLM): SLM allows you to control which LIFs (Logical Interfaces) are used to access specific LUNs, thus reducing the number of paths and potentially improving performance by aligning with best practice configurations.

Reconfigure the fabric switch zoning: Adjusting the zoning on the fabric switches can help manage and optimize the number of paths, ensuring that there are not too many paths that could lead to inefficient I/O operations and performance degradation.

For more details, refer to:

NetApp SAN Host Configuration

NetApp Best Practices for SAN

To ensure the best performance in an iSCSI SAN implementation:

Connect host and storage ports to the same switches: This minimizes latency and maximizes the efficiency of data paths by ensuring direct connections within the same network segment.

Configure Jumbo frames in the entire data path: Setting a larger Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size reduces the overhead for processing each packet, thus improving overall network performance. Ensuring Jumbo frames are configured end-to-end in the data path is crucial for optimal performance.

For further details, check:

NetApp Best Practices for iSCSI

NetApp Community Discussion on iSCSI Performance

When a LUN shows 90% used space in the NetApp ONTAP CLI but a Windows Server shows only 10% used space, the discrepancy is often due to how space allocation is handled between the two systems. Enabling space allocation ensures that the ONTAP system accurately reflects the actual space usage as reported by the host system, in this case, the Windows Server. This adjustment allows ONTAP to reclaim and manage space more effectively, aligning the reported usage between the ONTAP system and the host.

For more information, refer to:

NetApp Community Discussion on Space Allocation

NetApp Documentation on Space Usage