Netapp AggrSpaceCheck 2.0 needed

I was recently helping out a company attempt to upgrade their Netapp Filer from OnTap 7.3 over to Data OnTap 8.  We ran the Netapp Upgrade advisor and got to a section that wanted us to run the AggrSpaceCheck tool to make sure that the aggregates had sufficient space available.  Normally, I skip this step because I usually have plenty of space available, but in this particular case, some of the aggregates were already 99% full.  Since we didn’t want to have a serious failure during our upgrade we decided to error on the side of caution (and best practices) and run the AggrSpaceCheck tool.

When we ran the AggrSpaceCheck tool we started receiving this message.

Could not retrieve Aggregate free space. Could not get any aggregates in this filer.

The message doesn’t really suggest that an error occurred, just that the tool couldn’t retrieve the free space.  Upon further research I found that RSH is being used to connect to the filer, and RSH is not part of Windows 7 by default.  RSH can be used if you have the Subsystem for Unix Applications feature installed, but my machine was Windows 7 Pro and it’s not available in that version.  http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/subsystem-for-unix-based-applications-sua-missing/43e67de2-4d65-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5?msgId=43b0ea44-5d65-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5

Now what?  Running a simple tool to determine if there is enough free space to perform an upgrade has become a large pain point.  This is why I’d love to see Netapp come out with an AggrSpaceCheck 2.0.  Perhaps it can use SSH by default, a powershell script, or even better, just be able to determine the space from the upgrade advisor.

If anyone more familiar with Netapp has any information about this tool, please comment about any known plans for this in the future, or perhaps any better ways to run the tool that might be out there.  I’d love to see some comments.

Usable Workaround with AggrSpaceCheck_1.0 on Windows 7 Pro

Full Disclosure:  This workaround was provided from a Netapp Forum https://forums.netapp.com/thread/30994 (NOW Account Required)  A big thank you to yaoguang for his work on this issue.  I’ve added his work below.

To use AggrSpaceCheck_1.0 on Windows 7 Pro

1.   Install Strawberry perl  http://strawberryperl.com/

2.   Make the following modifications to the aggrspacecheck.pl file

You should only need to change the RSH to plink.  And add –ssh with a pw
====================================================================================================

sub setConfig {

my ($remCmd, $options);

$PuserName = ‘root’ unless $PuserName;

unless ($^O =~ /MSWin32|linux/i) {

$errorMsg = “Unsupported OS $^O. Only Windows and Linux are supportedn”;

return -1;

}

$remCmd = “plink“;

if ($^O =~ /MSWin32/i) {

$options = “$PfilerName -ssh -l $PuserName  -pw netapp123 “;

=================================================================================================

3.   Place the plink.exe, aggrspacecheck.pl, and aggrspacecheck.exe in the strawberry directory.

4.   Run the following command:  perl aggrspacecheck.pl –filer “FILERNAME”