Head replacement of a production FAS3210....

STEVEINTALLYFL — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:02:17 GMT

We have a production FAS3210 (Ontap 8.1.2P1 7-Mode) HA Cluster connected to a pair of DS4243 SAS shelves. We are replacing the heads with a FAS3220. The aggregates are all divided into NFS volumes and exports (4 X 1TB and 1 X 2TB on each shelf). Each controller owns one shelf and partners the other shelf.

Each export is a VMware ESXi 4.1 datastore. All our servers are virtualized on these datastores - production, testing, sandboxes - most are Linux, but a few are Windows Server 2008R2. The VMware vCenter server is a virtual guest as is the external Oracle 11gR2 external database server for vSphere and vUM used by vCenter and Update Manager. There is no other storage system to migrate these vmdk. The VMware is set up for high availability (vMotion and Storage vMotion).

It may or may not matter, but the compute platform is Cisco UCS with fabric interconnects.....and the NetApp is connected there on 10GB and 1GB IP ports.

I am certain I am not the first inadequately experienced systems overseer to have to plan out the downtime maintenance window and processes to perform this head swap, so I am reaching out to the community for advice and warnings from experience.

I think that I should:

Tturn off the HA features in VMware at the start of the process.
Take note of which guest server is on which ESXi host and what datastores are assigned to the guest server.
Shut down all the virtual guests (first web servers and application servers, then database servers) EXCEPT the database server that hosts the vSphere and vUM databases
Shut down the vCenter Server
Connect the vSphere Client directly to the host that has the external databases for vCenter and shut that virtual guest down.
Place the ESXi hosts in maintenance mode (directly connecting the vSphere Client to each ESXi host in turn).
Shut down the FAS3210 controllers.
Swap out for the FAS3220 controllers (and cable up).
?????

I am sure there are details missing - and maybe things that need not be done - so I am interested in feedback from all who have walked this process before me.

Re: Head replacement of a production FAS3210....

DEAN_GILBERT — Tue, 28 May 2013 15:36:13 GMT

I found the doc in the link below very useful when I did this :-

https://library.netapp.com/ecm/ecm_get_file/ECMP1147119

It details the entire process and for different scenarios, in particular reusing the existing vol0 or using the new one etc.

Dean

Re: Head replacement of a production FAS3210....

STEVEINTALLYFL — Tue, 28 May 2013 15:42:21 GMT

Thanks, this is helpful.

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Head replacement of a production FAS3210....

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Re: Head replacement of a production FAS3210....