NetApp Console local deployment is a self-hosted deployment option that runs the Console control plane in your own on-premises environment. It delivers unified storage management and automation—provisioning, policy enforcement, drift detection, and remediation—while keeping your data, metadata, and management traffic entirely within your own infrastructure, so you get operational leverage without sacrificing data sovereignty. Learn about NetApp Console local deployment.

You deploy NetApp Console local deployment as a virtual appliance in your VMware vCenter environment using a pre-configured OVA image. After deployment, discover your storage and add members and assign roles to get started. Learn about deployment options.

No. You don't need a license or subscription to start using NetApp Console local deployment. However, some NetApp data services accessible from the Console local deployment, such as NetApp Backup and Recovery, are licensed or subscription-based and might have an associated cost.

The typical workflow is to discover storage systems into the correct fleets, define storage class policies, create storage classes from those policies, associate classes with the fleets where they apply, provision volumes or LUNs using a class, and then monitor for drift and remediate to keep workloads aligned. Learn about managing storage.

A storage class is a reusable template that captures your organization's storage standards—performance, capacity, security, and data protection—in a single named object assembled from storage class policies. When you provision using a storage class, the Console local deployment enforces those standards automatically without per-workload configuration decisions, and afterward it monitors the workload against the class and alerts you if it drifts out of compliance. Learn about storage classes.

Storage class policies are the building blocks you combine to construct a storage class. Each policy governs one dimension of storage behavior, so you define policies independently and then assemble them into a class. This lets you reuse the same policy across multiple classes or update a policy in one place and apply that change to every class that uses it. Learn about storage class policies.

NetApp Console local deployment includes four types of storage class policies:

Learn about storage class policies.

No. The Console local deployment includes system-defined policies across all four policy types and predefined storage classes. You can use them as-is or copy them as a starting point for custom policies and classes tailored to your organization's requirements. Learn about storage class policies.

Before you create a storage class, make sure you:

Learn about storage classes.

After provisioning, the Console local deployment continuously evaluates each workload against its storage class. When a workload drifts—from a direct cluster configuration change or degrading performance—the Console flags the violation immediately and raises an alert. You can follow guided remediation steps or configure automated remediation to resolve common drift conditions. Learn about storage classes.

A storage fleet groups storage systems that you manage together. Instead of configuring policies or access cluster by cluster, you apply them once at the fleet level so every cluster in the fleet operates under the same standards, which reduces repetitive work and keeps behavior consistent. Learn about storage fleets.

Folders group related fleets (for example, by region or business unit) and can't have storage systems associated with them directly, while fleets group the storage systems you manage together. Folders are an organizational and access-delegation tool that isn't visible to members without IAM permissions—members access fleets, not folders. Learn about folders and fleets.

When you associate a storage class with a fleet, the Console local deployment applies that class's policies to all provisioning within the fleet. Workloads provisioned in the fleet automatically inherit the performance, capacity, and tiering rules without administrators selecting or verifying settings, making the fleet-to-class association the primary way to enforce consistent standards across clusters. Learn about storage fleets.

NetApp Console local deployment supports three provisioning workflows, all of which enforce storage classes and remain governed by RBAC and audit logging:

Learn about managing storage.

NetApp Console local deployment provides fleet-wide health and performance dashboards to spot clusters or volumes that need attention, the Workload Analyzer for deep-dive volume investigation, configurable alerts and notifications, and guided or automated remediation. Learn about storage monitoring.

The Workload Analyzer shows a single volume's behavior over time, correlating latency, throughput, IOPS, resource utilization, capacity, and configuration changes within the same window so you can pinpoint root causes. It can help you determine whether storage or another layer, such as networking, is the source of an application issue, and you can act on Fix-It recommendations directly from the analyzer. Learn about the Workload Analyzer.

Low available capacity can be the cause. When an ONTAP system is more than 85% full, the high utilization can itself cause performance issues, so the Workload Analyzer's capacity section can explain latency that the performance charts alone don't account for. Learn about the Workload Analyzer.

Alerts originate from the ONTAP Event Management System (EMS) on discovered clusters and from NetApp Backup and Recovery operations, consolidated into a single organization-wide view. Each alert identifies the affected system, a severity (such as critical, warning, or informational), and an impact area (capacity, connectivity, data protection, performance, or security). The Console shows alerts only for the fleets your permissions allow. Learn about alerts.

A notification rule matches alerts on service, severity, impact area, and target system, then delivers notifications to users with specified access roles through email or webhook. Note that rules apply to specific systems, not to fleets, and can be muted during planned maintenance windows. The Console includes default rules and lets you create custom ones. Learn about alerts.

Custom dashboards let you build personalized monitoring views by assembling cards from predefined templates, choosing the scope, metrics, aggregation, target resources, and time window. Templates cover performance, capacity, health, and alerts, and you can scope cards to any level of the ONTAP hierarchy. Each dashboard and card is private to you and shows data only for resources you're authorized to view. Learn about custom dashboards in NetApp Console local deployment.

RBAC lets you assign predefined, least-privilege roles to members at the organization, folder, or fleet level, and the same role grants different effective access depending on the scope where you assign it. This lets you give broad access to central administrators while limiting regional or team admins to the fleets they manage. Learn about role-based access control.

A role assigned at the organization or folder level is inherited by all child folders, fleets, and resources beneath it, so your folder and fleet design determines how broadly an assignment applies. You can't override inherited access at a lower scope—to change it, modify the assignment at the higher scope where you originally granted it. Learn about role inheritance in NetApp Console local deployment.

NetApp Console local deployment groups predefined roles into three categories:

Learn about the predefined access roles.

Integrating with Active Directory lets users sign in with their existing corporate credentials, eliminating separate Console passwords and letting administrators look up directory users when assigning access. Authorization stays separate: the Console still uses its own roles to control what each member can do. Learn about secure access.

Local users can enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add another verification step that reduces the risk of unauthorized access if credentials are compromised. Directory-authenticated users can't enable MFA through the Console local deployment. Learn about secure access.

You bring your own subscription or service access for a supported provider type: OpenAI or OpenAI-compatible. You then supply a valid API key during configuration. You also need the Console deployed with cluster access, outbound network connectivity to the configured endpoint, the Organization admin role, and storage classes that guide provisioning. Learn about LLM integration.

The Console sends prompts and related context only to the LLM endpoint you configure. If that endpoint is a third-party cloud service, data is sent to that service over HTTPS. If that endpoint is an internal OpenAI-compatible service, data stays on your internal path for that integration. All AI actions also respect your RBAC, and sensitive operations require your confirmation. Learn about LLM integration.

Once you connect an LLM, the Console assistant lets users provision storage, investigate alerts, and get answers using natural language. Users choose an access mode: in Read only mode the assistant answers and guides without making changes, while in Read/write mode it can act on storage infrastructure but shows the details for the user to review and confirm before each change. Connect your LLM and enable the NetApp Console assistant.

NetApp Console local deployment gives you access to NetApp Backup and Recovery so you can back up and restore data from the same interface, keeping governance consistent and reducing the number of tools your teams operate. Learn about data services.

Every administrative action generates an audit record that you can review and filter from the Audit page. You can export audit logs to your own syslog server through a webhook so they reach your centralized monitoring or SIEM tools for longer retention and analysis, and because the Console runs in your environment, log data never leaves your infrastructure. Audit NetApp Console local deployment activity.