topic Moving / Renaming vol0 in ONTAP Discussions

Moving / Renaming vol0

chriskranz — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:30:35 GMT

There's been many occasions where I've wanted / needed to move the vol0 to somewhere else. Just last week I had a customer that wanted to destroy the root aggregate and move some disks around, but they'd already setup the filer and didn't want to lose this.

The process is actually very simple!

Renaming the vol0 is exceptionally simple and needs no downtime.

vol rename vol0 new_name

And it'll be done live! You might want to re-export your NFS exports, double check the CIFS shares and update any SnapMirror / SnapVault, but from the filers point of view, all is fine!

To change the filers root volume this is also fairly simple. This can be really useful, so if you copy the vol0 to somewhere else, or you need to recover it from a SnapMirror destination, or you simply just want vol0 in a different aggregate.

First of all you'll need an extra root volume, this does need to be a complete and full system volume with OnTap and all the relevant config files already in it. The filer does a quick check, but obviously not a full boot test. Once you have this volume in place, you simply tell the filer this will be the new root volume

vol options vol_name root

And on boot this will become the new system volume. If you've moved aggregates, the root aggregate will also get updated.

If for whatever reason you manage to kill the filer by doing this (say you didn't actually have a full root volume that you told it to use), then go into maintenance mode and you can change the root volume back from within here (CTRL+C on boot, then option 5).

Re: Moving / Renaming vol0

bepresseditor — Sun, 16 May 2010 06:55:29 GMT

Ah, nice post. But what if your root aggregate is your only aggregate... and you have no spares (e.g. an FAS2020 with 12 drives in the root aggr0)? Is that a complete wipe (e.g. http://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb16410 ).

Re: Moving / Renaming vol0

amiller_1 — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:17:48 GMT

Good note...it can be that simple but I usually like to bring everything over (including snapshots) as it's not all that much extra work.

Create a new root volume
Restrict it
Use volume copy to bring everything over from the old root volume (vol copy -S)
Unrestrict the new root volume
Set the root vol option on the new root volume.

Re: Moving / Renaming vol0

jeromehains — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:09:23 GMT

Wow! Exactly what I was looking for! Thank you guys!

Re: Moving / Renaming vol0

STORAGE_1 — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 23:38:28 GMT

Don't forget that you have to reboot the filer in order for the root volume change to take effect.