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ONTAP SAN driver overview

Contributors netapp-aruldeepa
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Learn about configuring an ONTAP backend with ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP SAN drivers.

ONTAP SAN driver details

Astra Trident provides the following SAN storage drivers to communicate with the ONTAP cluster. Supported access modes are: ReadWriteOnce (RWO), ReadOnlyMany (ROX), ReadWriteMany (RWX), ReadWriteOncePod (RWOP).

Important If you are using Astra Control for protection, recovery, and mobility, read Astra Control driver compatibility.
Driver Protocol volumeMode Access modes supported File systems supported

ontap-san

iSCSI

Block

RWO, ROX, RWX, RWOP

No filesystem; raw block device

ontap-san

iSCSI

Filesystem

RWO, RWOP

ROX and RWX are not available in Filesystem volume mode.

xfs, ext3, ext4

ontap-san

NVMe/TCP

Refer to Additional considerations for NVMe/TCP.

Block

RWO, ROX, RWX, RWOP

No filesystem; raw block device

ontap-san

NVMe/TCP

Refer to Additional considerations for NVMe/TCP.

Filesystem

RWO, RWOP

ROX and RWX are not available in Filesystem volume mode.

xfs, ext3, ext4

ontap-san-economy

iSCSI

Block

RWO, ROX, RWX, RWOP

No filesystem; raw block device

ontap-san-economy

iSCSI

Filesystem

RWO, RWOP

ROX and RWX are not available in Filesystem volume mode.

xfs, ext3, ext4

Astra Control driver compatibility

Astra Control provides seamless protection, disaster recovery, and mobility (moving volumes between Kubernetes clusters) for volumes created with the ontap-nas, ontap-nas-flexgroup, and ontap-san drivers. See Astra Control replication prerequisites for details.

Warning

  • Use ontap-san-economy only if persistent volume usage count is expected to be higher than supported ONTAP volume limits.

  • Use ontap-nas-economy only if persistent volume usage count is expected to be higher than supported ONTAP volume limits and the ontap-san-economy driver cannot be used.

  • Do not use use ontap-nas-economy if you anticipate the need for data protection, disaster recovery, or mobility.

User permissions

Astra Trident expects to be run as either an ONTAP or SVM administrator, typically using the admin cluster user or a vsadmin SVM user, or a user with a different name that has the same role. For Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP deployments, Astra Trident expects to be run as either an ONTAP or SVM administrator, using the cluster fsxadmin user or a vsadmin SVM user, or a user with a different name that has the same role. The fsxadmin user is a limited replacement for the cluster admin user.

Note If you use the limitAggregateUsage parameter, cluster admin permissions are required. When using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP with Astra Trident, the limitAggregateUsage parameter will not work with the vsadmin and fsxadmin user accounts. The configuration operation will fail if you specify this parameter.

While it is possible to create a more restrictive role within ONTAP that a Trident driver can use, we don't recommend it. Most new releases of Trident will call additional APIs that would have to be accounted for, making upgrades difficult and error-prone.

Additional considerations for NVMe/TCP

Astra Trident supports the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) protocol using the ontap-san driver including:

  • IPv6

  • Snapshots and clones of NVMe volumes

  • Resizing an NVMe volume

  • Importing an NVMe volume that was created outside of Astra Trident so that its lifecycle can be managed by Astra Trident

  • NVMe-native multipathing

  • Graceful or ungraceful shutdown of the K8s nodes (23.10)

Astra Trident does not support:

  • DH-HMAC-CHAP that is supported by natively by NVMe

  • Device mapper (DM) multipathing

  • LUKS encryption