The Manage ONTAP™ SDK v2.0P2 |
|
|
|
|||
|
||||
The use of this SDK is governed by the terms of the License Agreement. The authors of included code also want you to read their copyright notices.
| Getting started |
Introduction to Manage ONTAP SDK
Release History(including changes made in this release)
Introduction to ONTAPI Management APIs
| The Manage ONTAP Management Interfaces |
"Manage ONTAP" is Network Appliance's term for the complete set of management interfaces that can be used to manage a Network Appliance filer.
Follow the links in the picture for information on each of the interfaces. This SDK especially features ONTAPI, Network Appliance's new set of open XML-based APIs for managing filers from 3rd party code.
| Which interface should I use? |
The following table lists common tasks that management applications might perform,
along with recommendations on which interface set(s) to use. These will be explained
in more detail later.
| Filer/Netcache discovery |
SNMP |
| Network and overall system health monitoring | SNMP |
| On-demand virus scanning | vpolicy |
| On-access file filtering, access control and so on | fpolicy |
| Backup and data migration | NDMP |
| Management of standard CIFS features such as shares, directories, and file permissions | Win32 API |
| Security analysis | syslogs, CIFS auditing |
| Full filesystem scans | fast filewalking code |
| Management of Netapp-specific functionality such as SnapMirror®, snapshots, quotas and so on | |
| Command-line tasks not covered by any other API | rsh, telnet |
| Exploring ONTAPI |
Use this Windows-based utility to take a look at how ONTAPI routines are called and what kind of information they return.
The ONTAPI Explorer lets you experiment with the ONTAPI APIs 
To explore the APIs from Unix, use the "ontapi" Perl script like this:
% ontapi <filer> root <passwd> snapshot-create volume <vol> snapshot <snapshot>API Reference -- for APIs like "snapshot-create", above.
| Sample code and utilities |
Sample code and utilities are available--in varying degrees--for three languages at present. We recommend this introductory tutorial before diving in to the links below.
| Fast file walking |
A common problem in the SRM space is filesystem traversal to gather information on all the files. Using a multithreaded application is the best way at present to achieve good performance for this task on a filer.
| API Versions |
Each major release of the ONTAP operating system provides interfaces, such as the MIB, ndmp and ONTAPI, which are supersets of the interfaces provided in earlier releases. The chart at ONTAP_Interface_Versions.html contains links to the versions of various interfaces and lists correspondences to major ONTAP releases.
| Simulators |
Manage ONTAP includes simulators for both the Network Appliance filer running on either Linux or Solaris. Using these, you can test your 3rd party application without fear of disrupting the operation of a production machine. You can also run multiple copies of the simulator to simulate a number of appliances working simultaneously. At least 250MB of main memory per simulator is advised, and each simulator needs its own real or virtual Ethernet interface.The simulator simulates a filer or netcache to a very low level; even the network device drivers use ONTAP code. Each disk in the appliance is simulated by a file in the ,disks (“comma disks”) directory located in the top-level simulator installation directory. A ,mac-address (“comma mac address”) file in the simulator’s directory tells it what Ethernet MAC address to use. Address conflicts can be fixed by changing one or more of the numbers in that file.
A frequently stumbled over “gotcha” is that simulators cannot contact the host machine on the host’s primary interface. So if you attempt to telnet from the host to the simulator’s command line, the telnet session will hang.
Performance of the simulator is acceptable for unit and integration testing purposes. Performance tests always require real equipment. The simulated disks use approximately twice the disk capacity of the ones they are simulating.
The simulator does NOT provide the kind of data protection one might suppose. The data is only as safe as the disk in the underlying system that stores the files containing the simulated disks.
Setup of simulators requires several steps. The instructions for these are bundled with the simulator itself.
Simulators are not currently supported by Network Appliance Customer Satisfaction, nor is it advised that you use the simulator as a "cheap filer" Complaints about data loss when using a simulator as a file storage appliance will be met with polite derision. If your testing requires a large amount of data on the simulator, we advise storing it elsewhere and writing a script to write it to the simulator's simulated filesystem should it become necessary to reinitialize it for any reason.
| Design Guides |
Performance Management Design Book
iSCSI Management Design Book
| System Requirements |
| Support |
|
|
