An Ansible Playbook is the correct tool for this task. NetApp provides an officially supported and certified Ansible collection, netapp.ontap, which includes modules specifically designed to automate ONTAP administration. The administrator can use the naontapvolume module within a playbook to define the desired state for multiple volumes (e.g., name, size, aggregate) and execute it against the Cloud Volumes ONTAP instance. This provides a simple, agentless, and idempotent method for automating storage provisioning.

A. Heat Orchestration Template is used for orchestrating infrastructure resources within an OpenStack cloud environment, not for managing storage volumes inside a running ONTAP instance.

B. While NetApp does provide a Puppet module, Ansible is more commonly recommended and used for its agentless architecture and simplicity in automating specific, discrete tasks like volume creation.

D. A BlueXP AppTemplate is a high-level orchestration tool used to deploy and manage entire application stacks, not for granular, resource-level administrative tasks like creating individual volumes.

1. NetApp Technical Report 4734, "Ansible and NetApp ONTAP": Section 3, "ONTAP modules for Ansible," describes the netapp.ontap collection. Section 4.1, "Creating a volume," provides a specific example of a playbook using the naontapvolume module to create a new volume on an aggregate. This directly matches the user's requirement.

2. NetApp BlueXP Documentation, "Learn about application templates": This document states, "Application templates enable you to deploy and manage applications in a Kubernetes cluster from BlueXP." This confirms that AppTemplates are for application-level orchestration, not direct volume management.

3. NetApp ONTAP Automation with Ansible: The official NetApp documentation page highlights the use of Ansible Playbooks as a primary method for automating ONTAP, stating, "You can use Ansible to automate provisioning and managing your NetApp storage." It directs users to the netapp.ontap collection.