You long-time and short-time admins out there, you ever ask the question "Wow, I wish I had an owners manual for my filer".   I hear it time and time again about the sheer volume of information available to support the filer, but nothing short, simple and sweet to cover it.

Well, look no further than the excellent collateral Rusty Walther and John Laino’s organization brought us!

Available now! with minimal effort on your part (NOW Login Required) You can download an Owners Manual for your filer!

Available in:

• English A4
• English 8.5×11
• Chinese
• French
• German
• Hebrew
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Spanish

This particular guide is intended to cover Support Best Practices.  This is first in a line of many tools which enable you to do more with your own environment and unique needs while taking advantage of the benefits of the many within our install base.

So, be sure to check this out if you have a filer (or work with filers) and keep an eye on Rusty Walther’s  blog (and guest blogger John Laino) for additional information like this in the future!

So, as seen here NetApp Expands Storage and Data Management Solutions Supporting Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Physical and Virtual Environments this can mean a lot for environments which want high resiliency, modern systems (Server 2008, Hyper-V) and helping to further consolidate Server sprawl as well as Storage sprawl.

But what does this mean for you or I?

Oh, this is where the fun gets started!

It’s one thing to have supported SnapManager products on the latest Apps:

• Windows Server 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• Exchange Server 2007

But to also be able to support them instanced within Hyper-V, I have to add ‘coolerific’ to the equation.    What this means is that even I in my lab/sandbox/testbed/Laptop ;) will be able to actually simulate any of these environments as well!

My testbed happens to be a Lenovo T61P, 4gb of ram, running Server 2008 (Enterprise), Hyper-V enabled, Also running the NetApp Data ONTAP Simulator for local-side simulated (yet real) storage!

I’ll be able to run rig with all scenarios of apps, dependencies and then replicated it back to my actual real filers, along with the older apps (while not mentioned, but not less important) such as MOSS, Exchange 2003, SQL 2005, and beyond!

Yea, I think it’s pretty damn cool that the support is there, and gives me something even *I* can take advantage of, let alone large scale enterprises!