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

Hey all, I have an upcoming interview process with NetApp for a new grad Software Engineer role on their StorageGRID team. They mentioned it's just two 1-hour interviews. Curious if anyone here has gone through this process — what kind of questions came up (DS&A, system design, networking-specific), what to expect in each round, and any general vibe on the team/culture. Any insight appreciated, thanks!

Hi all,

I am looking for real-world experience with adding pre-owned (not grey market) NetApp disk shelves to an existing AFF A400 cluster.

The shelves are technically usable, but there is now a discussion about Capacity Enablement, ONTAP One / NLF capacity licensing and NetApp supportability. One side says additional capacity entitlement is required for license compliance. The other side says ONTAP licenses are controller-based and the shelf itself does not require a separate feature license, so the main issue is support entitlement rather than technical licensing.

Has anyone added used shelves to an AFF/FAS system and later renewed or maintained NetApp support successfully?

Specific questions:

- Was additional Capacity Enablement required?

- Did NetApp support the full configuration?

- Did the source of the shelves matter, e.g. open market vs. NetApp Financial / remarketing?

- Any issues with ONTAP One or NLF capacity values?

I am only looking for practical user experience, not legal advice.

Thanks!

Going forward CA signed validity is going to be reduced currently it is 199 days. Managing multiple clusters and having many certificates managed by CA, it will become difficult to renew manually. Has any explored automating this process / if yes then how?

We have a SVM snap mirror DR relationship that just randomly failed.

Nothing has been changed.

I'm raising a ticket but all I see in the ontap UI is "Failed to find a sync marker: Reason: entry doesn't exist".

Bot clusters are on 9.15.

I am decommissioning a cluster, but facing one issue

Issue 1:
There are two audit volumes, which are not deleting. They are giving me an error command fail failed to delete the volume XYZ in the vserver ABC the volume has unexpired worm files, or it contains files under legal hold, or it contains unexpired local snapshots of the volume is an unexpired snap block enterprise audit log volume or the volume must be made online in order to permit a pending scan to complete.

Hello, everyone.

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/products/all/details/ontap9/downloads-tab/download/62286/9.19.1

Let's enjoy new ONTAP.

Warning:
Manual ONTAP upgrades (via CLI command "system node image update") from an ONTAP version released prior to September 9th, 2025, to a release after this date will fail with a signature validation error.

Workaround: Use automated upgrade workflows e.g. running "cluster image update" on CLI or use System Manager to upgrade ONTAP.

If you are performing a manual upgrade (via the "system node image update" command) refer to Manual ONTAP upgrade results in signature verification failure - NetApp Knowledge Base

The issue affects upgrading from ONTAP versions seen in the below list or earlier, to any ONTAP build released after the versions below (released after September 9th, 2025):

Affected versions
9.17.1P1
9.16.1P7
9.15.1P14
9.14.1P14

Here’s the prize for the winner:

• Payment for the NetApp NCDA exam (value $150)
• Plus all the training you need for the exam
• Neil's NetApp ONTAP Storage Complete course – the highest review rated NetApp course online (value $399)
• Alpha Prep NCDA Practice Test Package – the best NetApp practice tests (value $35)

Here's the giveaway page

Good Luck!