For the purpose of capturing details and for easier documentation, the command line is used. If the GUI is preferred, you can provision all the settings in System Manager.

Historically, the initial bulk setup for larger projects is usually faster by using the commands listed Table 1, especially if you concatenate the commands in a worksheet. This list of commands also serves as excellent build documentation.

Another provisioning option is using day 0 and day 1 automation scripts using Ansible. NetApp has hundreds of existing Ansible playbooks available for download, including the Ansible Galaxy collection through the ansible-galaxy collection install netapp.ontap command.

The GUI also works great with a simple single-page LUN and shared provisioning. GUI is best used for operations when adding, modifying, or deleting storage. Either option is fine if you apply the best practice storage settings in Table 1.

The complete cluster setup and storage/host provisioning should not take more than an hour when staged.

Best practice storage settings