NS0-185 Exam Dumps - NetApp Storage Installation Engineer - ONTAP Professional Exam

Flow control configuration is an important validation step in ONTAP SAN and NAS environments, especially in switchless cluster designs. NetApp documentation clearly differentiates flow control requirements between data networks and cluster networks.

For data network ports, full flow control must be enabled when hosts are configured with full flow control. This ensures proper congestion management and prevents packet loss during high-throughput NAS operations such as NFSv4.1 and SMB traffic. Matching flow control settings between hosts and storage data ports is a best practice explicitly stated in NetApp installation guidance.

In contrast, cluster network ports must have flow control disabled. The cluster network is highly sensitive to latency and congestion, and enabling flow control on cluster interconnect ports can introduce delays that negatively affect cluster quorum, node communication, and overall stability. NetApp explicitly requires flow control to be disabled on cluster network interfaces.

Enabling flow control on cluster ports or disabling it on data ports would violate NetApp-supported configurations and can lead to performance degradation or cluster communication issues.

Therefore, the two correct settings to verify are:

Data network ports have full flow control enabled

Cluster network ports have full flow control disabled

This makes C and D the correct answers.

Explanation (250–350 words):

ONTAP clusters support amaximum of 24 nodesper cluster. In this scenario, the cluster already hassix nodesrunning mixed NAS (NFS) and SAN (FCP) workloads. When expanding an ONTAP cluster, NetApp best practices and installation rules strongly recommend adding nodesin HA pairsto maintain balanced high availability, performance symmetry, and consistent failover behavior.

Because nodes must be added in pairs, the cluster can scale from six nodes to eight, ten, twelve, and so on, up to the 24-node limit. However, the question is asking how many nodeswould be added, not the maximum supported. The standard NetApp expansion model for a six-node cluster is to addanother three HA pairs, which equalssix additional nodes, bringing the cluster to twelve nodes.

Adding only two or four nodes would result in uneven scaling and is not the standard recommended growth pattern for clusters of this size. Adding eighteen nodes would exceed practical expansion planning for a six-node system and approach the cluster maximum without justification.

Therefore, the correct answer is6.

NetApp best practices allow mixing NAS protocols (NFS and CIFS) or SAN protocols (FCP and iSCSI) within the same SVM, but not mixing NAS and SAN.