topic Re: Unable to delete snapmirror policy in ONTAP Discussions

Unable to delete snapmirror policy

TABER_BRANDEN — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:13:52 GMT

- I'm trying to get rid of an old SVM. There are no volumes or mirrors associated with it anymore that I can see.

- When I try to delete it I get the error that there is still a snapmirror policy associated with it.

- I then try to delete that policy and it comes back with:

"Error: command failed: Failed to delete policy "VserverDR". Reason: Policy is associated with a SnapMirror relationship."

- Yet no mirrors seem to be using it. I don't get it. Any help is much appreciated.

cluster::*> snapmirror show -policy VserverDR -vserver vserver1
There are no entries matching your query.

Re: Unable to delete snapmirror policy

robinpeter — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 05:18:08 GMT

seems like an interesting one 🙂

Can you please run this command and pose the output.

::> snapmirror show -vserver vserver1 -fields policy

::> snapmirror policy show -vserver vserver1

::> snapmirror policy show -vserver vserver1 -instance

::> snapmirror policy show -policy VserverDR -instance

Re: Unable to delete snapmirror policy

mattedw001 — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 12:23:37 GMT

Was there a solution to this problem. We have exactly the same problem.

Re: Unable to delete snapmirror policy

TABER_BRANDEN — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 16:38:10 GMT

I believe this is a bug with cleaning up an old SVM DR relationship. I don't know if NetApp has a fix in a newer version or not.

While probably not officially supported by NetApp, I've found a workaround.

cluster::> set d

Warning: These diagnostic commands are for use by NetApp personnel only.
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y

Find the UUID of the vserver where the rogue snapmirror policy lives:

cluster::*> debug smdb table vserver_by_uuid show -vserver vserver1

This will spit out a bunch of stuff but you are only interested in the first field, the UUID. It will look something like: 63cd8266-f743-11e3-813a-123478563412

Delete the rogue entry out of the underlying table. Be very careful about this because if you delete the wrong thing it can cause all kinds of problems.

cluster::*> debug smdb table snapmirror_policy delete -vserverUuid 63cd8266-f743-11e3-813a-123478563412 -policy VserverDR

Once this is gone you should be able to go ahead and delete your old vserver.