One of the cool things about NetApp’s OnCommand Workflow Automation (as is cool with any modern automation platform) is the ability to have pre-populated fields and selectors within your workflows. In most cases you’re going to be using WFA to automate a task that will need to interact with a NetApp FAS 7-Mode or Clustered Data ONTAP disk array. WFA has this capability by default, but wants you to use an OnCommand Unified Manager (UM) server as the proxy to the FAS array’s configuration data. Not everyone uses Unified Manager (although they should – blog post for another time). If I’m looking to leverage WFA at a client, I’m not necessarily going to rely on Unified Manager always being there.
Fret not! The WFA team at NetApp has created a work-around for the UM-challenged. A Direct 7-Mode and cDOT Datasource has been created for the sole purpose of circumventing UM. Just beware you’re pulling configuration data directly from your array. Not that this is anywhere near performance impacting, it’s still probably not something you want to be doing every 5 minutes. The default collection setting in WFA is 1440 minutes. I usually leave this at the default and will manually have the data source collect configuration data before kicking off workflows.
The setup for this is fairly straightforward:
- Download the DAR files from the link above (NetApp Communities page – DAR file links are at the bottom of the page).
- Import the DAR files into WFA.
- Create new credentials for the arrays that you will be using.
- Lastly, define your new Datasource using the correct Datasource type.
- Make sure everything works properly after creating the Datasource. You should see a status of “Completed” in the lower half of the Datasource screen.
- If the collection status comes back as “Completed”, then you’re all set to start kicking off some workflows! The fields in the example below (red arrows) show fields auto-populated from the Datasource collection.
Happy scripting!!