AWS FSx for ONTAP -Storage Provisioning

Intro

To manage unmanaged data, AWS introduced FSx - a storage offering from AWS which is a collaboration between AWS and NetApp. You can bring in the features of the NetApp ONTAP cluster within AWS and you can use AWS API or AWS cli to manage the storage. You could use the features of NetApp such as Snap-Mirror and Snapshots, De-duplication, Compression etc.

Unlike traditional ONTAP cluster the AWS FSX for ONTAP is a fully managed cluster i.e. installation and maintenance is taken care by AWS. It has also automated storage tiering to move data into low cost storage for cold data. It supports multiprotocol access such as SMB, CIFS and iSCSI and we can access from AWS EC2 Linux, Windows OS and container services like ECS and EKS.

FSx ONTAP Resources:

Basically you provision the below 3 resource for your file storage

Filesystem
A file system is the primary resource for ONTAP
resource, similar to an on-premises NetApp ONTAP cluster.

Storage Virtual Machine(SVM)
A storage virtual machine(SVM) is an isolated file server with its own administrative and data access endpoints for
administering and accessing data. A default SVM is create when
you create a filesystem. We can add more SVMs if needed.
Basically the clients and the work station access the data via
the SVM endpoint.

Volumes
FSx for ONTAP volumes are virtual resources that you use for
organizing and grouping your data. Volumes are logical
containers, and data stored in them consumes physical capacity
on your file system. Volumes are hosted on SVMs.

By default, when you create a new file system from the AWS Management Console, Amazon FSx automatically creates a file system with a single storage virtual machine (SVM) and one volume. After your file system is created, you can create additional SVMs and volumes as needed.

Data Migration

To migrate the data from on-premise to AWS we can basically setup a SnapMirror replication between the on-premise volume to the AWS FSX volumes and sync all changes.

How to Create a FSX file system using Management Console

Step 1

Search for FSx and select create filesystem

Step 2

Select Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and click next

Step 3

Select standard create option to customize various configuration.

• Give a name for your filesystem.
• Select the deployment type where to be single AZ or multi AZ.
• Select the flash SSD storage capacity, the minimum is 1024 GiB
• We can customize your provisioned IOPS as per your application requirements by selecting User-provisioned option.
• Throughput Capacity is recommended based on your SSD capacity we can customize that as well.

Step 4 - Network Setup

As we have selected Multi AZ in the previous step it will basically launch a 2 node ONTAP cluster i.e. an active node on 1 AZ and a passive node on other AZ.

Select the VPC

Attach the security Group of the VPC.
Basically 2 subnets from the VPC were selected, there will be data sync happening between the preferred subnet cluster(active) and the standby cluster(passive).In event of any failure to the preferred subnet cluster the standby subnet cluster will become active.
We can select the routes and as well as provide an endpoint IP address for the cluster. Here I am leaving it as default.

Step 5 - Setup the Security and Encryption

We have the option to setup the encryption key from KMS, I would
leave that to default for this demo.
We have to specify the admin password for filesystem to access from ONTAP CLI

Step 6 - Storage Virtual Machine

We need to create a separate admin access for SVMs, you can create multiple SVMs for multi tenancy requirement to share the same filesystem. you can also set a password for the SVM.

Step 7 - Create a volume

These volume created support thin provisioning ie it consumes the storage of what we use. By enabling storage efficiency you could able to leverage ONTAP features such as compression, deduplication, snapshots etc. You can also set the snapshot policy

Once you hit create you can able to create the filesystem and mount it on the VM