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NetApp OnCommand Insight Cloud Install

Dennis Faucher

• 6 min read

NetApp OnCommand Insight Cloud Install


I am working with a customer this week that would like to increase visibility into their heterogeneous storage. The end result may be consolidation and/or refresh. NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI) is the perfect tool to use to gather utilization of heterogeneous arrays. Before installing at the customer, I thought I would get some practice by installing on a cloud VM.

Create Cloud VM

The OnCommand Insight release notes recommend a minimum of 8 CPU cores and 24 GB RAM. I chose a CentOS 7 AMI and placed it on an AWS t2.2xlarge VM which provides 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM. For disk, I chose 500 GB SSD which is much, much more than I need for this test (200 GB is needed for 18 arrays). In terms of the AWS security group (firewall), OCI requires the ports listed below, but only ports 443 & 3306 require external access:

  • Server process are 80, 443, 1090 through 1100, 3873, 8083, 4444 through 4446, 5445, 5455, 4712 through 4714, 5500, and 5501.
  • Port requirements for the acquisition process are 12123 and 5679.
  • Port requirement for MySQL is 3306.
  • Port requirements for Elasticsearch are 9200 and 9310
  • Ports 443 and 3306 require external access through any firewall that is present.



                  Install OnCommand Insight

                  The main page for OnCommand Insight can be found here.
                  Documentation for OnCommand Insight can be found here.
                  I’ll be installing OCI on a Linux VM in AWS. The latest version of OCI requires Red Hat
                  Enterprise Linux 7.3 or 7.4, or CentOS 7.2 or 7.5.
                  OCI is downloaded from mysupport.netapp.com. Downloads, Software, OnCommand Insight, Linux, Go!




                  After clicking Go!, you will need to click Continue and then accept the EULA. You will be provided with a list of OCI components to download. I selected the OnCommand Insight Server installer (821 MB).

                  • OnCommand Insight Server installer
                  • OnCommand Insight Remote Acquisition Unit installer
                  • OnCommand Insight Data Warehouse installer (without Reporting)
                  • OnCommand Insight Data Warehouse with Reporting installer (requires Windows)
                  • OnCommand Insight Anomaly Detection Engine installer
                  • OnCommand Insight Ethernet Monitoring Unit installer

                  Since AWS VMs do not have a GUI installed by default, I downloaded the OCI installer to my laptop and then used scp to copy the installer to the AWS VM. (scp -i “oci-key-pair.pem” ./oci-7.3.4.3.7-linux-x86_64.zip [email protected]:oci-7.3.4.3.7-linux-x86_64.zip)


                  The CentOS image did not have the unzip command, so I installed unzip with “sudo yum install unzip”. I then unzipped the installation image with the “sudo unzip 
                   oci-7.3.4.3.7-linux-x86_64.zip”

                  Before running the install, make sure any default installations of MariaDB are removed.


                  • rpm -qa | grep mariadb
                  • yum remove component_name (sudo yum remove mariadb-libs-5.5.56-2.el7.x86_64)





                  The installation script is run through this command: “sudo oci-7.3.4.3.7-linux-x86_64/oci-install.sh”. You will be asked a few questions about your customer name, site name, ASUP, port numbers and then the installation will begin.


                  To test the completed installation, point your browser to https://servername. Default login is admin/admin123.





                  Install NetApp Cloud Volumes (Array VM) in AWS

                  Now I need some storage to manage. Luckily NetApp Array VMs (Cloud Volumes) can be provisioned directly from NetApp OnCommand Cloud Manager.

                  There are two pieces required 1) NetApp OnCommand Cloud Manager 2) NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS

                  1) OnCommand Cloud Manager
                  From the AWS Marketplace, search for OnCommand Cloud Manager. Click Continue to Subscribe then Continue to Configuration. Take all the defaults and then click Continue to Launch. Answer the launch questions. I chose the same VPC and subnet as my OCI instance. Click Launch. You will now have two EC2 instances for NetApp:


                  You can access your Cloud Manager instance at https://[aws-public-ip-address]


                  If you do not already have a login, fill in the form in the SIGN UP tab, login and then enter your site name. The first login takes a few minutes for the main screen to display.




                  2) Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS

                  Now that Cloud Manager is up and running, we can create a Cloud Volume to manage.



                  To keep this simple, I chose Cloud Volumes ONTAP. Enter your AWS key information and then some details about your new NetApp cluster


                  Choose the AWS Region, VPC, and subnet. I chose the same as my OCI AMI. Then choose whether your data will be unencrypted or encrypted by AWS.

                  Answer whether you are Bringing Your Own License or not. You then create your Cloud Volumes configuration either from a template or custom.


                  After choosing a size, enter your NetApp Support Credentials


                  Now, create a volume


                  Choose efficiency and tiering options

                  Review & approve




                  When the volume is finished initializing, you can click on it for the IP address of its controller. This IP address can be used for direct management as well as management from OCI.

                  I now have a NetApp Array (Cloud Volume) ready to manage. I added a GUI and vncserver to my RHEL 7 OCI VM using these instructions and then pointed a browser to the IP address of my new NetApp Array in AWS. My 100 GB NFS volume with default snapshot protection is there and healthy.


                  Test the NFS Volume

                  • (From the NetApp OCI AWS VM)
                  • sudo mkdir /mnt/netapp
                  • sudo mount -t nfs [NetApp_Volume_IP_Address]:/NetAppOCICloudVolume /mnt/netapp 
                  • mount|grep netapp
                    • [NetApp_Volume_IP_Address]:/NetApp_100GB_NFS on /mnt/netapp type nfs (rw,relatime,vers=3
                  • ls -lR > /mnt/netapp/ls.txt
                  • ls -l /mnt/netapp
                    • -rw-rw-r–. 1 centos centos 3564 Jan  3 15:38 ls.txt

                  Register Storage with OCI

                  Registering storage with OCI is very simple. Choose Data Sources under Admin, click Add, and then choose the data source type you are adding.







                  In the Configuration section, enter the IP of the array controller, username and password and click Test. If everything works, click Save.


                  Create Dashboards

                  I wanted to create a view of my storage by OEM. I created a new dashboard and then added a pie chart widget and a table widget.