Microsoft Virtualization Discussions

Activate volume on 2nd controller

GVM666GVM
3,644 Views

In EMC I can easily change the active controller for a volume.

In NetApp I can't seem to find such a feature.

I either need to use SnapMirror (and have double the space needed, license needed), ndmpcopy (long downtime; double the space needed) or vfilers (still copies all data over if I understand correctly).

Is this due to the architecture of OnTap?

Is it actually possible to easily swap 2 controllers? (controller 1 becomes controller 2, controller 2 becomes controller 1)?

By swapping the physical controllers and the CF cards?

Thanks in advance!

4 REPLIES 4

CCOLEMAN_
3,644 Views

Hello,

This feature has been built into Data ONTAP's C-Mode OS, which is the latest and greatest from NetApp. But, keep in mind, this is a fairly new OS that works very differently than the traditional versions of Data ONTAP and is therefore unfamiliar to a lot of people.

Swapping controllers is pretty straight forward, but requires downtime. Moving forward on C-Mode, no downtime is required when you're moving controllers around.

If it's on a hypervisor, you can easily move stuff around with storage vMotion or whatever it's called on your specific hypervisor.

Just curious, what protocol are the volumes you're trying to move leveraging?

I don't know a ton about EMC, so i'm curious to know which feature they have that allows data migration without downtime while at the same time not making a full copy?

GVM666GVM
3,644 Views

Thanks for your quick reply!

Great to know that C-Mode can accomplish this. However this is an existing environment with both iSCSI LUNs and NFS shares.

Could you go a little deeper into the actual controller swap? I understand there will be downtime, however I wonder how long (minutes? hours?) and how risky this is.

So basically everything should be moved (from one controller to the other).

In EMC you can change the Storage Processor used to present a LUN.

aborzenkov
3,644 Views

For controller swap I would estimate 1hr downtime. It is basically physical installation and cabling and couple of commands afterwards. LUN may need more attention due to serial number change. If you do not have experience with it, plan couple of hours at least.

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Re: Activate volume on 2nd controller

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Thanks for your quick reply!

Great to know that C-Mode can accomplish this. However this is an existing environment with both iSCSI LUNs and NFS shares.

Could you go a little deeper into the actual controller swap? I understand there will be downtime, however I wonder how long (minutes? hours?) and how risky this is.

So basically everything should be moved (from one controller to the other).

In EMC you can change the Storage Processor used to present a LUN.

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TERREMARK_BE
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Is there a guide I can follow?

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