Are 2 root volumes required?

[mikey328]

Hi there,

Looking for some guidance on a FAS8020 that I need to decommission the SATA shelves on this week. I have a SAS shelf that's owned by Node 2 that has a fully populated aggregate, and 3 SATA shelves that I'm trying to get rid of that's owned by Node 1. 

My question is, can I delete the root aggregate and vol0 that belongs to the SATA disks without harming anything on the SAS based Node 2? I know this is OS data, but I'm curious if I can run with just the one on Node 2. I have no spare SAS disks to move the volume to either.

Thanks in advance!

[GidonMarcus · Accepted solution]

Hi

a node cannot be operational (even for redundancy only) without a root volume. you'll have to find a way to have two root aggregates and two root volumes...

if you wish, you can shut one of the nodes, remove the shelves and reinstall it anytime later... (if it's a cluster mode system you'll likely want to run node unjoin to do a clean decommission)

Gidi

[mikey328]

Perfect, thank you. Just wanted to confirm that I could run on one node and not disrupt any production data on the other node. However if I do so, say the SAS node I have runs into hardware issues or something, I cannot fail it over to the other node correct?

[GidonMarcus]

Correct- you cant failover . but, if you remove the node properly, and keep it on the same ONTAP version - you can do a head swap between the controllers (as like replacing motherboards)if the first node fails.