topic Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe in ONTAP Discussions

Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

victorcharlesedwards — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:43:49 GMT

Besides shutting down the filers and physically moving the fiber cable, what other steps need to be taken to safely move our failover loop from slot 2 port 4 into slot 1 port 3?

We have two filers (FilerA and FilerB) running DOT 8.0.2 7-Mode as a cluster. Each filer manages one loop, as well as the failover loop for the other filer's shelves. We need to free up slot 2 on both filers in order to install an external SAS adapter.

While my gut tells me I can simply shutdown both filers and move the fiber cable from slot 2 port 4 into slot 1 port 3, I wanted to verify with the community if this is the best approach.

Thanks!

Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

scottgelb — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:35:58 GMT

With the systems down or in maintenance mode there is no issue changing the source hba port (but can't be done with the system up - see similar discussion a day or two ago on here). ONTAP will find the disks on any path. I would go to maintenance mode though and confirm all disks with disk show, storage show -p and aggr status to make sure all disks are available over all paths and all aggrs show up after the change.

Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

victorcharlesedwards — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:27:52 GMT

Thanks Scott! Would this be doable in failover? For example if I:

Failover FilerA to FilerB
Power-off FilerA
Move Cable Over on FilerA
Power-on FilerA
Run (via maintenance mode) disk show / storage show -p / aggr status
Repeat for FilerB

Re: Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

scottgelb — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:30:16 GMT

Looks good.. Or move cables in maint mode too.. Then cf giveback and repeat. It would be worth opening a case just to have one proactive in case of any issue then close after.

Typos Sent on Blackberry Wireless

Re: Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

aborzenkov — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:57:40 GMT

There was discussion on toasters about shelf unplug and the answer (from NetApp employee) was - the only safe way is with both heads down. It may appear to work with takeover/giveback but you are still risking panic after days or weeks.

Now, moving shelf connection to another adapter basically means "unplugging" all shelves on old one. So I am not sure. I would simply switch off to be on safe side.

Re: Removing Secondary Interconnect PCIe

scottgelb — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:59:28 GMT

Support approved takeover/giveback for us…as long as the node changing the source port is the one taken over. It is a CP issue with NVRAM flush and the diskid…in takeover the down node doesn’t have the issue.