Netapp Storage Manager for Proxmox

[PoschMox93]

Could be interesting for you when you running Netapp together with Proxmox:

Storage Manager for Proxmox (SMP) offers end-to-end storage management for virtual machines within Proxmox environments that utilize NetApp storage systems. By allowing administrators to directly manage storage, SMP simplifies both storage and data management tasks in Proxmox environments.

Key features​

• End-to-end storage management: SMP provides complete lifecycle management for virtual machines, from provisioning storage to backup and recovery.
• Direct storage management: Proxmox administrators can manage storage directly, streamlining operations and reducing complexity.
• Standalone installer: SMP is delivered as a standalone installer that seamlessly connects to Proxmox nodes via APIs.

Capabilities​

Each component of SMP is designed to enhance storage management efficiency:

• Storage provisioning: Easily allocate and manage storage resources for Proxmox hosts and associated virtual machines.
  
  • NFS storage provisioning: Set up and configure ONTAP NFS storage to be used with your Proxmox environment.
  • iSCSI storage provisioning: Implement thick LVM with multipath for robust and efficient iSCSI storage management.
• Backup and recovery: Perform reliable backups and swift recoveries to ensure data integrity and availability.
  
  • Crash-consistent and file-consistent backups: Ensure data integrity by setting up both crash-consistent and file-consistent backup mechanisms.
  • VM restore operations: Execute virtual machine restore processes to recover data and maintain system availability.
• Storage efficiency: ONTAP provides a comprehensive suite of storage efficiency technologies designed to minimize the storage required for data. These technologies not only reduce storage consumption but also enhance system performance, delivering:
  
  • Rapid VM provisioning: Streamline the provisioning of virtual machines for quicker deployment.
  • Quicker Dataset Copies: Speed up the duplication of datasets for efficient data management.

More Info see: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/netap....html#learn-about-storage-manager-for-proxmox

 

[LnxBil]

Good to see that there is at least some work done for a better integration, but this is totally useless in comparison to other existing storage solution that just hook into PVE itself. Why would someone want an additional interface for something that already has an interface? This, once more, proves that the legacy storage vendors really don't get what PVE wants or what modern virtualization wants. Yes, VMware does not support this and uses a similar approach as the one every storage vendor want's to use, but this is not how PVE does this. Automating the LVM creation or NFS is NOT what you want. This is how things were done many years ago, it still works but is totally unflexible.

Storage management should be completely transparent so that you just setup a single connection to the storage and just use it: setup once on cluster creation and after that I don't need any interaction with the storage itself, at least that is what I expect from a storage from the virtualization side of things. If I need different pool / tenants, I just create multiple storage entries but that is all I need to do. I create a VM and the storage-glue in PVE does everything behind the scenes, so creating the volume, exposing it and I just use on the PVE side. One LUN per virtual disk. Automatically provisioned, storage backed snapshot and replication on the storage side. All just done via an API. There are already 3rd party projects doing this so please just look at them and adapt to the storage systems you sell. This is not hard and the legacy storage vendors would have an edge if they would have done this earlier or at all.

Please, hire someone who knows what PVE does behind the scenes and what customers want, this is not it. I would advise any customer strongly against using such a solution and would point them always to vendors that understand what PVE really does and integrate well. You're of couse not alone, sadly all legacy storage vendors do not understand how things work in PVE and want to use their decades old understand of how things should work, so please do a better job.

 

[PoschMox93]

Hello @LnxBil,
It often depends on what someone needs. Personally, I handle most of the storage provisioning & administration in PVE. This software from NetApp is completely free, and anyone who finds it useful is welcome to use it. What I find more interesting is the integration of storage snapshots into PVE, to provide additional protection alongside the daily backup from your PBS:

SMP allows protecting an entire datastore, where one ONTAP NFS volume contains multiple VMs, groups of VMs that may span several datastores, or at an individual VM level.

When restoring a volume or datastore on NFS, SMP initiates a volume snap restore operation on the target volume. For VMs hosted on NFS volumes, SMP validates the restore parameters including VM ID, snapshot name, site IDs, and storage type. If the VM is running, SMP stops it by polling its status and issuing a stop command. The system then restores VM disks from the snapshot using a file-level restore operation.

For iSCSI datastores or LUNs, SMP restores the LUN from the snapshot, verifies the restored device, performs an iSCSI rescan across Proxmox nodes, and ensures device accessibility. For VMs residing on iSCSI storage, SMP clones the snapshot LUNs, maps the cloned LUNs to the Proxmox host, and performs iSCSI discovery to import them. The restored storage is then added, and VM configurations are updated. VM disks are moved back to their original storage with progress tracked per VM. The process concludes with cleanup activities, including the removal of temporary storage and deletion of cloned LUNs.

 

[LnxBil]

Thank you for reporting back and explaining what it does. I can see that the tool has its place for solving problem that arise if you use LVM or NFS with VMs. For that purpose it automates a lot of the complexity and is well and good, yet I still prefer not to have the problem the tool solves at all by having the full storage integration I tried to explain earlier.
Due to to lack of proper snapshot support in most legacy storage vendor solution, we implement regular backups (e.g. each 2-4h) with PBS in order to have a working snapshot-like fallback layer. Your tool can give similar results with a different technical solution to the problem backed by the storage vendor. I would still prefer the PBS solution as it is also integrated into PVE and I can manage everything from within PVE itself.

 

[deebsr]

we noticed this tool showing up when we updated the Shift tool as well. it looks very promising for us. Getting backups offloaded to the Netapp storage side will be massive!