A Guide to Enabling The VAST Data Catalog
This video from VAST Data Customer Education provides a step-by-step guide on how to enable the VAST Data Catalog within the VAST Management System (VMS). For storage administrators looking to unlock powerful metadata querying and reporting, this tutorial explains the simple process and key configuration options. The VAST Catalog is a standard, built-in feature that requires no additional licensing. The video walks through the process of activating it, which can be done easily via the VMS GUI in Settings - VAST Catalog. The tutorial covers the initial configuration settings you will be prompted to define:
Frame Frequency: How often the system takes a snapshot of your data's metadata.
Data Retention: How long to keep these indexed "frames" for historical queries.
File System Snapshots: The option to include full file system snapshots alongside the metadata, providing a deeper level of historical data but consuming additional space.
We address a key consideration for the initial setup: the first-time processing. We explain that this initial "bulk load" of metadata may take some time depending on your cluster's size, but subsequent updates will be much faster due to VAST's efficient delta processing, similar to its snapshot and replication mechanisms. The video also demonstrates how to add custom user-defined attributes and S3 tags to be indexed, allowing you to create dedicated query columns for your specific metadata, even after the catalog has been enabled. This tutorial is designed to provide VAST Data operators with the practical knowledge to activate and configure the VAST Catalog, laying the groundwork for simplified storage management and data analysis.