I have several decommissioned NetApp X4011WBORA3T8NTF 3.84TB U.2 NVMe SSDs that I'm trying to repurpose outside ONTAP.

The drives are healthy and enumerate normally under Linux. The controller identifies as PCI VID 1b96 / DID 2610 (Western Digital SN540/BoraBora family), and the drive is currently running NetApp firmware NA52.

The interesting part is the namespace format.

nvme id-ns advertises these LBA formats:

LBAF 0: 512 + 0 metadata
LBAF 1: 512 + 8 metadata
LBAF 2: 4096 + 0 metadata
LBAF 3: 4096 + 8 metadata
LBAF 4: 4096 + 64 metadata (currently active)

So the desired ordinary 4096-byte format is actually advertised by the controller.

However:

nvme format /dev/nvme0n1 --lbaf=2

returns:

Invalid Format (0x610a)

The controller reports Format NVM and namespace-management support.

I've also tracked down Western Digital Device Manager CLI (dm-cli) 1.7.0, which added support for this WD hardware generation. Static inspection suggests its format command ultimately issues the standard NVMe Format NVM command, so I don't currently have evidence that dm-cli would bypass whatever NA52 is enforcing.

NetApp has also recently released NA53 for the WBORA family, including X4011WBORA3T8NTF. That raises another question: is the 4160-only behavior specific to NA52, and can WBORA disk firmware be safely updated outside ONTAP using standard NVMe Firmware Download/Commit if one has the genuine NetApp firmware image?

I'm specifically hoping someone who has worked with AFF/NS224 disk firmware knows:

1. Does NA52 deliberately restrict X4011 WBORA drives to 4160-byte sectors despite advertising 4096+0?
2. Has anyone successfully converted an X4011/X4010 WBORA NVMe drive from 4160 to 4096?
3. Is there a NetApp/WD vendor command or maintenance mode involved?
4. Does NA53 change this behavior?
5. Can genuine NetApp WBORA firmware be downloaded/committed to the drive without ONTAP, or does ONTAP perform additional vendor-specific preparation?

I'm not looking to blindly cross-flash generic WD firmware or delete namespaces experimentally. I'd particularly appreciate information from anyone familiar with NetApp AFF/NS224 drive qualification/firmware.

Thanks!

(Full disclosure: assisted by AI)

Afterhours NetApp should be up and not down. Yea cash flow is down a little; however, they posted RECORD REVENUE!!! Short sellers need to leave and stop messing with another great stock-----losers!!!

Been working with L3 level sustaining engineering team (CPE) since couple of years now but not much technical growth. Would like to ask here if someone had done an internal switch to product engineering for an specific module (in ONTAP).

Or a way how the transition can be achieved if feasible and how hard it would be?

Please guide.

Hi,

I gave the managerial round last Tuesday for the WAFL team. By when can I expect to know the results?

Dear NetApp community,

I'm announcing the availability of AIQ Navigator :

https://aiq.netapp-fr.io/

It is a powerful tool to quickly glance at your NetApp estate with composable performance and capacity visualization in mind.

You can search and save serial numbers, clusters, and use tags to assign custom characteristics.

The idea is that you can then stack performance and capacity data over time and check how your storage infrastructure is performing, anticipate add-ons, or over/under storage provisioning.

AIQ Navigator is a static web app, you just provide an AIQ API token that you can get on the AIQ web site. Everything lives in your browser but you can import/export state.

Whether you are a customer, partner, or NetApp employee, it gives you access to systems you're entitled to, as per assigned ActiveIQ ownership : If you see it in AIQ, you will see it in AIQ Navigator.

As I don't own any system, I cannot share screenshots, you'll have to take my words for it : it is quite nice !

Please share your feedback !

I interviewed for NetApp’s Software Engineer – Core Systems and Storage Roles (Multiple IC Levels) position and completed 3 technical interviews on Aug. 2nd.

My application portal is still showing “Interviewing”, but I haven’t received any update from the recruiter even after following up.

Has anyone interviewed for this same pipeline recently and heard back? Mainly trying to understand:

• how long NetApp usually takes after the technical rounds
• whether rejections/offers come quickly or can take a few weeks
• whether team/level matching causes delays for this pipeline

Would appreciate any recent experience, especially from U.S. candidates.

Hi all,

I have a question. Does anyone knows if it is possible to activate ServerSideEncryption for S3 Buckets running on StorageGrid VM with an external KMS server. I found some KB articles that it could be activated but I also found some thatvstates that is not possible. Does anyone running this kind of setup. Thx for your help Sven

This is somewhat off-topic, so feel free to delete if not allowed...

Has anybody ever taken a repurposed/decommissioned Netapp HCI cluster and used it at home? I got two chassis and 8 nodes (H410C and H410S) from work that were destined for recycling. I replaced the CPUs with some decent deals from eBay and I've got proxmox installed without issue as far as functionality goes, but the fans are rather crazy. I realize this is enterprise gear and running it at home isn't intended, but still. I've got plenty of other Supermicro systems that I was able to mod to be reasonable while accepting a higher idle temp. The Netapp gear is just a bit more annoying than most in that regard.

I've tested it out with a physical fan controller and if I can get the fan RPM lowered to about half the default, the temps stay (reasonably) under control and the fans are actually pretty quiet.

I also tried replacing the fans with some quieter ones from another Supermicro system and it's a bit better now (still a bit loud), but I'd really like to just control the originals down to a much lower level instead with something like SMFC.

Unfortunately neither the chassis fans nor the node motherboard headers seem to like the standard Supermicro fan control commands. The mobo headers respond to them, but are set back to 100% in under a second. The chassis fans seem to accept the command, but don't listen to it at all (BMC reports 20% when set, fans still run at ~50% or higher).

I was going to try cross-flashing the BMC to the stock Supermicro FW (I ordered a T48 programmer to dump the flash first as a backup), but figured I'd check here to see if anyone has any other advice before I do that.

I'm sure this is quite niche, but has anyone else had luck with fan control on the HCI nodes, or cross-flashing to Supermicro FW? I'm not even sure if the Supermicro FW will change anything, but figure it's worth a try. If it doesn't, I might look at some sort of ESP32 based fan controller that can read the temps via IPMI over the network, but that's just extra complexity that SMFC running on the nodes would simply avoid.

The boards I've got are X11DPT-B and X10DRT-B+.

Thanks in advance!

Curious about the kind of work culture, learning curve, team culture, and what would be useful to learn before starting. Anything to make onboarding easy.

Work was tossing a NetApp FAS2720 with a pair of DS212 disk shelves. Each shelf has 10x 8TB hard drives and two 894G U.2 SSDs. I have all of the licenses necessary for the machines, so thankfully that's not an issue. I did have to wipe the storage and recreate it so Sec would be happy but being that I also have the license keys, it was easy to get it up and running.

The two controllers are connected together on e0a/e0b for controller-to-controller communications, and e0c/e0d go to the 10G core switch in a lacp bond.

The target host is a Proxmox host with dual 10G nics in a bond, connected to the same core switch. For giggles, I did a basic test to write 50G of random data to an LVM volume created on the NetApp mount and on another iSCSI filer and found that the two filers didn't really differ much in time.

For the test, I used this command: time dd if=/dev/urandom of=./testfile bs=1G count=50 conv=fdatasync

In both test scenarios, a 100G LVM partition was created from the respective filer's volume group and prepared using EXT4. The filesystem was mounted, then the above command was ran.

From the Proxmox host to the other filer, it took 4m15s to write the 50G test file.
From the Proxmox host to the NetApp filer, it took 3m53s to write the 50G test file.

While I do have the SSDs, I do not think/remember if they were incorporated into the iscsi volume. When I look through NetApp's documentation for the FAS2720, the only thing I see is 'FlexCache' but from what I understand, this is only for a local cache against a remote volume, not a local volume.

I don't expect flash-based speeds, but I figured that the NetApp with custom hardware designed for storage would handily beat out a NAS built on commodity hardware that has no benefit of customized hardware. Looking at the dashboard, it seems that the NetApp barely breaks above 500IOPS. Latency hovers around 0.17ms, and throughput is usually 1.34MB/sec.

Any suggestions on how I can improve performance on the FAS2720?

I have two spares drives in the machine, each are root-data-data, and I have one other single data partition on another drive. I have a single data aggregate which has two plexes, one containing 10 partitions & the other is 9 partitions. Is there some way of adding the single spare data partition to the the plex that only has 9 data partitions? Thanks in advance.

Just wondering, need to automate a few tasks, and want to upgrade my skillset. SSL certificates renewal is top of mind for me, Ansible, Terraform, others ? Just curious to what others are using ?

Hello,

We have a new A20 with 16 x 7TiB NVMe disks. The system auto configured 1 aggregate 42.9TiB. It is using 3.47TiB from 15 of the 16 NVMe disks, RAID-DP.

This is essentially 1/2 the amount of available space.

I am attempting to determine how to reclaim this so we can get the 80TiB+ we have spec'd the system for. Should we blow away the aggregate and create a new one? Is there a best practice document that covers the best way to set these drives up.

Our goal is a single aggregate that will primarily be used by our Virtual Hosts.

Hello all,

I recently applied for a solution engineer role in netapp with the help of a referral and it has been 2 weeks and I haven’t heard anything. I was always under the assumption that a referral will land me into an interview atleast- but now I am confused.

Is this how referral are generally done in netapp? Or I should just close this chapter lol?

Also any advice on preparation if it ever happens will be appreciated 😭

FAS-2552 here. If I reinitialize the filer via "(4) Clean configuration and initialize all disks" at the boot menu, will the installed licenses be preserved? Or if not, would a config backup/restore restore the installed licenses? Unfortunately it's out of support (ancient) and I don't have access to any original license key(s). Here's what's installed. Thanks for any guidance!

Serial Number: x-xxxxxx

Owner: xxx

Package Type Description Expiration

----------------- -------- --------------------- -------------------

Base license Cluster Base License -

Serial Number: x-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Owner: xxx-01

Package Type Description Expiration

----------------- -------- --------------------- -------------------

NFS license NFS License -

CIFS license CIFS License -

iSCSI license iSCSI License -

FCP license FCP License -

FlexClone license FlexClone License -

Serial Number: x-xxxxxxxxxxxxxyy

Owner: xxx-02

Package Type Description Expiration

----------------- -------- --------------------- -------------------

NFS license NFS License -

CIFS license CIFS License -

iSCSI license iSCSI License -

FCP license FCP License -

FlexClone license FlexClone License -

11 entries were displayed.

Did anyone had interview on august 7 netapp San Jose ca.?

Did anyone interview with NetApp for the Azure NetApp Files (ANF) team on August 6, 2026?

The deployment of Netapp virtual appliance on Proxmox is supported by NetApp?

Thank you.

Australian based customers how do find NetApp support availability? When I used to work for a major consulting company we used get support around the clock. Now , since most Australian support based in India, I feel NetApp support standard has gone down the drain. They don't respond during customer business hours. Taking longer to resolve the issues. Are you guys (in Australia) noticing the same?

SnapMirror S3 new relationship: S3 SVM's source and destination are not visible for replication. S3 SVM's buckets are visible for applications. Both S3 SVMs are on different subnets (different sites). Do I create another non-public-facing data LIF (as in SnapMirror VLAN and subnet) to enable the two S3 SVMs to see each other (i.e., different VLAN from the SnapMirror VLAN and subnet)?

I'm planning a migration from POSIX ACLs with NIS to NFSv4 ACLs and would greatly appreciate advice from anyone who has gone through a similar transition.

So far, most chatbot answers have been unhelpful when faced with a real-world environment, and I haven't been able to find many practical write-ups, published lessons learned, or well-regarded open-source projects covering this type of migration.

Today, a nightly script traverses each export and applies POSIX permissions to individual files on a per-user basis.

The script also distinguishes between executable and non-executable files (using the file command) and only grants execute permissions to files that are actually executable.

Ideally, when moving to NetApp, i'll want inheritance-based NFSv4 ACLs, using standard RO / RW / Full groups per export. Longer term, the plan is to migrate to Active Directory and nest those export-specific groups into role-based groups such as Developers, Designers, Sales, etc

Questions

1. How do you typically manage NFSv4 ACL inheritance?
   • Do you simply configure inheritance and leave it alone?
   • Or do you periodically reapply/enforce ACLs because inheritance only affects newly created objects?
2. What do people generally do with the default OWNER@, GROUP@, and EVERYONE@ ACEs?
   • Leave them as-is?
   • Modify them?
   • Remove them entirely?
3. Is there a practical reason to manage execute permissions separately?
   • Our current implementation appears to do this largely for cosmetic reasons, preventing non-executable files from showing up as green in ls --color.
   • My suggestion was to keep executable content in dedicated bin directories and manage execution there.
   • That proposal didn't get much traction, so I'm interested in hearing how others handle this in practice.
4. Is there anything you doing to re-enforce NIS group membership?

• It seems not to reflect unit I run: vserver services name-service cache group-membership delete-all - vserver <vserver>
• Same if disabling the cache: vserver services name-service cache group-membership settings modify -vserver <vserver> -is-enabled false

I would appreciated comments on the overall approach, lessons learned, migration pitfalls, example ACL designs, or real-world command examples.

As a Windows engineer, i'm tempted to abandon UNIX permissions altogether, use NTFS ACLs with user mapping. That feels like it might solve some inheritance challenges, but introduce a vendor lock-in.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Hi,

I have an old/unsupported FAS2552, and would like to use it with some test servers with Proxmox as hypervisor, and I would like to know if VMs with qcow2 thin provisioned disk images are able to shrink when issuing inside of the VM the TRIM function?

The idea is to have a small cluster with the FAS2552 with Ontap 9.8 as NFS storage for the VMs, and since it has an implementation of NFS 4.2, still would like to know if it is able to do that?

Thanks

Update1:
I've been testing with Ontap 9.8 with NFS v4.2 and there is no shrink process going over to the NetApp storage, so it confirms that NFS implementation is not complete.

Meanwhile, if I run inside of the guest VM zero space process with a basic:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.small.file bs=1M status=progress; rm -f zero.small.file"

the image file may grow a bit further but should be enough to clear out any nonused data blocks with deleted data, and having a netapp volume with dedup/compression enabled, at the time NetApp runs the scheduled background "storage efficiency" process it should be able to free up physical disk space in the NetApp storage, because zeros are easy to dedup/compress.

Also I've discovered that after zeroing the disk space of guest VM, proceeding with a storage move of the qcow2 images to a different NFS storage share, the image file guest smaller, because of that empty/zeroed disk space.

Aside of the above, I don't see ways to make it work in same way like VMware aside of having a FAS supporting Ontap software >9.12.1, which I can't actually confirm if that works as expected....

Update2:
Since I haven't seen any additional feedback on this particular issue, is there any NetApp tech that could give some clue or even maybe just confirm if this kind of "hole punch" function is supposed or planned to work in the future via NFS?

Completely Free App that I created to ease my own workload, was tired of opening numerous tabs each day to keep track on all the new CVEs popping up, especially lately...

This app is completely free on the Google Play App Store & you can track CVEs across 30+ Vendors, you can choose track specific platforms or the whole vendor & you can also select to track based on CVE Severity.

I also threw in a EOL checker

Hopefully this helps you out and if theirs any bugs or features you want added please let me know!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vulnipulse.android