Using NABox for NetApp Performance Monitoring on Microsoft Hyper-V

If you’ve ever tried to install and configure Grafana, you’ll find that it’s not the easiest thing to use. Simply installing it and getting it to work right can be challenging, and when you factor in adding NetApp monitoring in using Harvest, it gets a bit more complicated.

There are some fairly good step-by-step configuration guides out there, such as this one on the NetApp communities, as well as this blog by Dan Burkland (@dburkland) that uses Docker to containerize NetApp Harvest.

There’s also a regularly updated .ova file called “NABox” that uses an “all-in-one” approach to deploying a monitoring VM. This was created/is managed by current NetApp employee Yann Bizeul (@ybontap).

This was the approach I used recently.

NABox uses .ova files, as mentioned, which are proprietary to VMware deployments. The .ova file is essentially a compressed file with:

• .mf file
• .ovf file
• two .vmdk disks

The .ovf is an XML file that contains the configuration of the VM – stuff like processors, RAM, network, etc.

The .mf file is basically a checksum of the files you get in the .ova.

The VMDKs are the disks you attach to the VM.

Deploy NABox in Hyper-V

Deploying the .ova is easy when you use VMware and covered on the NABox documentation page. But currently, there are no steps to use the image with Hyper-V. That’s where this blog comes in. (you likely can port these steps over to other virtualization technologies)

This section basically replaces “Deploying the OVA” on the NABox site.

1. Download the latest NABox .ova, the NetApp SDK and NetApp Harvest
2. Use your favorite zip tool to extract the files from the .ova (I use 7zip)
3. Convert the .vmdk files to Hyper-V compatible .vhd using VirtualBox(as described in this blog). These are the commands I used/the results.

   PS C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe clonemedium --format vhd C:\Users\parisi\Downloads\NAbox-2.6.1\NAbox-2.6.1-disk1.vmdk C:\Users\parisi\Downloads\NAbox-2.6.1\NAbox-2.6.1-disk1.vhd
   0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
   Clone medium created in format 'vhd'. 
   UUID: b6608a15-c334-49a7-9416-80ce516efea4PS 
   
   C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox> .\VBoxManage.exe clonemedium --format vhd C:\Users\parisi\Downloads\NAbox-2.6.1\NAbox-2.6.1-disk2.vmdk C:\Users\parisi\Downloads\NAbox-2.6.1\NAbox-2.6.1-disk2.vhd
   0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
   Clone medium created in format 'vhd'. UUID: def48aad-4e6c-4475-80d5-f145c5153e97

4. Open the .ovf file in your XML editor of choice. I used Notepad++.
5. Find the RAM requirements and processor count.

   <Item>
      <rasd:AllocationUnits>hertz * 10^6</rasd:AllocationUnits>
      <rasd:Description>Number of Virtual CPUs</rasd:Description>
      <rasd:ElementName>2 virtual CPU(s)</rasd:ElementName>
      <rasd:InstanceID>1</rasd:InstanceID>
      <rasd:ResourceType>3</rasd:ResourceType>
      <rasd:VirtualQuantity>2</rasd:VirtualQuantity>
   </Item>
   <Item>
      <rasd:AllocationUnits>byte * 2^20</rasd:AllocationUnits>
      <rasd:Description>Memory Size</rasd:Description>
      <rasd:ElementName>2048MB of memory</rasd:ElementName>
      <rasd:InstanceID>2</rasd:InstanceID>
      <rasd:ResourceType>4</rasd:ResourceType>
      <rasd:VirtualQuantity>2048</rasd:VirtualQuantity>
   </Item>

6. Create a new Hyper-V VM with the same number of processors and same amount of RAM as specified in the .ovf
7. Attach the disk 1 and disk2 .vhd files to the Hyper-V VM.
8. Power on the VM and configure as described in NABox Basic Configuration.
9. Finish the rest of the steps listed on the NABox page.

That’s it! Now you, too, can have a running instance of NetApp Harvest running on Microsoft Hyper-V in less than 30 minutes!

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