RBAC User Creator from NetApp

This is one of the coolest tools for any NetApp storage admin or implementation engineer to quickly and securely standardize the process by which users and roles are created and managed.

I had more than 3 people tell me today that they had not heard of this tool, and I just could not let that stand.

Problem Statement

One of the toughest administrative functions when managing a storage array is controlling who has access to what, especially in large enterprises where there are many admins with varying degrees of required access. Traditionally, admins were required to reference a particular KB article and copy/paste excessively long strings dictating permissions to resources.

This was … cumbersome, unreliable, and just plain sucked.

Some have solved this with in-house Powershell scripts, while others have taken the info from the KB article and turned them into scripts (I did as a customer).

David Kelly, one of the original developers of the Virtual Storage Console, took it upon himself as part of a side project to self-learn C# to rectify this problem.

Enter the RBAC User Creator

David maintains this thread on the NetApp Communities with links to the NetApp Tool Chest where you can download the software, as well as full changelogs and grooms the original post with changes to the product as it evolves.

Today, April 10th, he added an updated version of the ontapPrivs.xml to include support for the latest and greatest VSC and VASA Provider 6.0!

In addition, the latest version currently has native support for:

Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere
OnCommand Balance
Snap Creator Framework
SnapDrive for Windows
VASA Provider for VMware vCenter
Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager
Virtual Storage Console for Citrix XenServer (*NEW*)
Virtual Storage Console for RHEV (*NEW*)
NetApp Recovery Manager for Citrix Sharefile (*NEW*)
OnCommand Unified Manager (DFM) 5.1
VMTurbo Operations Manager (*NEW*)

This is one of the coolest tools for any NetApp storage admin or implementation engineer to quickly and securely standardize the process by which users and roles are created and managed.

It is an absolute MUST HAVE. Period. Hard Stop.

If you love it, be sure and leave a note for David either here or on his communities thread! I know I have certainly told him on more than one occasion how awesome it is.

To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if something like this ended up in System Manager in the future. It’s that good, and that simple.

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