OpenFiler is a great open source solution for your SAN needs. It's free and does what most high end SAN solutions will provide. One of the things you can leverage OpenFiler for is to provide you with your iSCSI targets. If you are a VMWare related virtualization shop, iSCSI protocol and storage is indispensable. In this article we will show you as to how you can configure OpenFiler to provide you with iSCSI targets. When configured with iSCSI targets, you can connect to these from any Windows or even Linux Unix machines and mount the iSCSI targets such that they appear as local hard drives or volumes. OpenFiler iSCSI implementation provides a great virtual platform to test out ESX or ESXi since iSCSI is the next best thing to fiber channel and is faster than some of the other normal protocols.

If you work on the NetApp Filers, you must have come across a situation where you get an AutoSupport notification from NetApp filer that a certain disk on the shelf has failed, this does not mean any interruption to the Filer serving data as usually it is equipped with spare disks which take over. However, it’s prudent to replace the failed disk as soon as possible so you are not left with degraded performance issue in case another disk fails. The auto support notification would usually tell you the disk and shelf number of the disk which has failed (for example 2b.32) but on the shelf, how can you be absolutely sure that you are replacing the right disk?

The following procedure describes how to upgrade the disk firmware on a NetApp Filer running Data OnTap version 7.2

 The first step before upgrading the firmware is to check if the correct disk qualification packages are present on the filer. This determined by checking the datecode on the qual_devices_v3 file. Do the following to check the datecode

This article provides step by step instructions on how to upgrade the Shelf Firmware on a NetApp Filer running Data OnTap version 7.2.  The Filer has four storage shelves which need their firmware to be upgraded.