Administering FSx for ONTAP resources - FSx for ONTAP
Managing file systems

Administering FSx for ONTAP resources

Using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and ONTAP CLI and API, you can perform the following administrative actions for FSx for ONTAP resources:

  • Creating, listing, updating, and deleting file systems, storage virtual machines (SVMs), volumes, backups, and tags.

  • Managing access, administrative accounts and passwords, password requirements, SMB and iSCSI protocols, network accessibility for the mount targets of existing file systems

Topics

Managing FSx for ONTAP file systems

A file system is the primary Amazon FSx resource, analogous to an on-premises ONTAP cluster. You specify the solid state drive (SSD) storage capacity and throughput capacity for your file system, and choose a virtual private cloud (VPC) in which to create the file system. Each file system has a management endpoint that you can use to manage resources and data with the ONTAP CLI or REST API.

File system resources

An Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system is composed of the following primary resources:

  • The physical hardware of the file system itself, which includes the file servers and storage media.

  • One or more highly-available (HA) file server pairs, which host your storage virtual machines (SVMs). Scale-up file systems have one HA pair, and scale-out file systems have two or more HA pairs. Each HA pair has a storage pool called an aggregate. The collection of aggregates across all HA pairs makes up your SSD storage tier.

  • One or more storage virtual machines (SVMs) that host the file system volumes and have their own credentials and access management.

  • One or more volumes that virtually organize your data and are mounted by your clients.

The following image illustrates the architecture of a scale-up FSx for ONTAP file system with one HA pair, and the relationship between its primary resources. The FSx for ONTAP file system on the left is the simplest file system, with one SVM and one volume. The file system on the right has multiple SVMs, with some SVMs having multiple volumes. File systems and SVMs each have multiple management endpoints, and SVMs also have data access endpoints.

The architecture of FSx for ONTAP file systems

When creating an FSx for ONTAP file system, you define the following properties:

  • Deployment type – The deployment type of your file system (Multi-AZ or Single-AZ). Single-AZ file systems replicate your data and offer automatic failover within a single Availability Zone, and offer scale-out file systems. Multi-AZ file systems provide added resiliency by also replicating your data and supporting failover across multiple Availability Zones within the same AWS Region.

  • Storage capacity – This is the amount of SSD storage, up to 192 tebibytes (TiB) for scale-up file systems and 1 pebibyte (PiB) for scale-out file systems.

  • SSD IOPS – By default, each gigabyte of SSD storage includes three SSD IOPS (up to the maximum supported by your file system configuration). You can optionally provision additional SSD IOPS as needed.

  • Throughput capacity – The sustained speed at which the file server can serve data.

  • Networking – The VPC and subnets for the management and data access endpoints that your file system creates. For a Multi-AZ file system, you also define an IP address range and route tables.

  • Encryption – The AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that's used to encrypt the file system data at rest.

  • Administrative access – You can specify the password for the fsxadmin user. You can use this user to administer the file system by using the NetApp ONTAP CLI and REST API.

You can manage FSx for ONTAP file systems by using the NetApp ONTAP CLI or REST API. You can also set up SnapMirror or SnapVault relationships between an Amazon FSx file system and another ONTAP deployment (including another Amazon FSx file system). Each FSx for ONTAP file system has the following file system endpoints that provide access to NetApp applications:

  • Management – Use this endpoint to access the NetApp ONTAP CLI over Secure Shell (SSH), or to use the NetApp ONTAP REST API with your file system.

  • Intercluster – Use this endpoint when setting up replication using NetApp SnapMirror or caching using NetApp FlexCache.

For more information, see Managing FSx for ONTAP resources using NetApp applications and Scheduled replication using NetApp SnapMirror.

High-availability (HA) pairs

Each FSx for ONTAP file system is powered by one or multiple high-availability (HA) pairs of file servers in an active-standby configuration. In this configuration, there is a preferred file server that actively serves traffic and a secondary file server that takes over if the active server is unavailable. FSx for ONTAP scale-up file systems are powered by one HA pair, which delivers up to 4 GBps of throughput capacity and 160,000 SSD IOPs. FSx for ONTAP scale-out file systems are powered by up to 12 HA pairs, which can deliver up to 72 GBps of throughput capacity and 2,400,000 SSD IOPS (6 GBps of throughput capacity and 200,000 SSD IOPS per HA pair).

When you create your file system from the Amazon FSx console, Amazon FSx recommends the number of HA pairs that you should use based on your desired SSD storage. You can also manually choose the number of HA pairs based on your workload and performance requirements. We recommend that you use a single HA pair if your file system requirements are satisfied by up to 4 GBps of throughput capacity and 160,000 SSD IOPs, and multiple HA pairs if your workloads need higher levels of performance scalability.

Each HA pair has one aggregate, which is a logical set of physical disks.

Note

You can't add HA pairs to existing file systems. Instead, you can migrate data between file systems (with different HA pairs) using SnapMirror, AWS DataSync, or by restoring your data from a backup to a new file system.