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Administration overview with System Manager

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System Manager is an HTML5-based graphical management interface that enables you to use a web browser to manage storage systems and storage objects (such as disks, volumes, and storage tiers) and perform common management tasks related to storage systems.

The procedures in this section help you manage your cluster with System Manager in ONTAP 9.7 and later releases.

Note

  • System Manager is included with ONTAP software as a web service, enabled by default, and accessible by using a browser.

  • The name of System Manager has changed beginning with ONTAP 9.6. In ONTAP 9.5 and earlier it was called OnCommand System Manager. Beginning with ONTAP 9.6 and later, it is called System Manager.

  • If you are using the classic System Manager (available only in ONTAP 9.7 and earlier), refer to System Manager Classic (ONTAP 9.0 to 9.7)

Using the System Manager Dashboard, you can view at-a-glance information about important alerts and notifications, the efficiency and capacity of storage tiers and volumes, the nodes that are available in a cluster, the status of the nodes in an HA pair, the most active applications and objects, and the performance metrics of a cluster or a node.

With System Manager you can perform many common tasks, such as the following:

  • Create a cluster, configure a network, and set up support details for the cluster.

  • Configure and manage storage objects, such as disks, local tiers, volumes, qtrees, and quotas.

  • Configure protocols, such as SMB and NFS, and provision file sharing.

  • Configure protocols such as FC, FCoE, NVMe, and iSCSI for block access.

  • Create and configure network components, such as subnets, broadcast domains, data and management interfaces, and interface groups.

  • Set up and manage mirroring and vaulting relationships.

  • Perform cluster management, storage node management, and storage virtual machine (storage VM) management operations.

  • Create and configure storage VMs, manage storage objects associated with storage VMs, and manage storage VM services.

  • Monitor and manage high-availability (HA) configurations in a cluster.

  • Configure service processors to remotely log in, manage, monitor, and administer the node, regardless of the state of the node.

System Manager terminology

System Manager uses different terminology than the CLI for some ONTAP key functionality.

  • Local tier – a set of physical solid-state drives or hard-disk drives you store your data on. You might know these as aggregates. In fact, if you use the ONTAP CLI, you will still see the term aggregate used to represent a local tier.

  • Cloud tier – storage in the cloud used by ONTAP when you want to have some of your data off premises for one of several reasons. If you are thinking of the cloud part of a FabricPool, you’ve already figured it out. And if you are using a StorageGRID system, your cloud might not be off premises at all. (A cloud-like experience on premises is called a private cloud.)

  • Storage VM – a virtual machine running within ONTAP that provides storage and data services to your clients. You might know this as an SVM or a vserver.

  • Network interface - an address and properties assigned to a physical network port. You might know this as a logical interface (LIF).

  • Pause - an action that halts operations. Before ONTAP 9.8, you might have referred to quiesce in other versions of System Manager.