Migrate an snapvault destination aggr to a new controller ?

[ousturali]

Hi to all

The customer has a old filer, with snapvault destination volumes and aggrs inside that.They bought a new controller with new disks.We will ,first configure the new filer for future snapvault destinatinon.Then they want us to connect the old filers shelves to the new controller.

My question is about the snapvault volumes, they have been in place for the last 5 years, and lots of data inside them.

If we connect the old shelves to new filer, and assign the disks to this new filer, do we have the old structure of aggrs and volumes with snapshots?.Or do we loose snapshots or something else,

In my opinion, all the aggr, volume and snapshots must retain ,but i havent tried something like that.

what is your opinion?

regards

[ttran · Accepted solution]

Hi Ousturali,

For most scenarios, the aggregate, volume, and snapshot structure will remain intact when moving the old shelves to the new controllers. One exception is when you have snapshots that are 32-bit and the new controllers are running an ONTAP version that no longer supports 32-bit snapshots. In addition, 32-bit aggregates will need to be converted to 64-bit aggregates. Data ONTAP 8.3 and newer no longer supports 32-bit data. So how impactful this will be is determined by the current ONTAP version the data is on and what ONTAP version the new controllers are running.

Another thing to keep in mind is if you are also migrating the disks containing the root aggregate over then you will want to perform a formal upgrade of the existing data to match the ONTAP version of the new controllers. Booting a newer version of ONTAP with an older major revision of ONTAP will update the RAID and WAFL versions on every disk but the actual ONTAP kernel isn't properly upgraded resulting in a messy situation to recover to make the data accessible again. If the root disks & aggregate aren't moved over then you will have to recreate the SVM/VSERVER, shares, LIFs, and other configurations before you can access the old data.

Here is a reference document for moving a shelf to another controller:

Physically moving an aggregate composed of disks 

Regards,

[aborzenkov]

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@ttran wrote:

For most scenarios, the aggregate, volume, and snapshot structure will remain intact when moving the old shelves to the new controllers.

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That is true only for moving aggregates between 7-Mode systems (unless something has changed very recently) and there is no information what OP has. It is quite unlikely that any new system today will be (or even supports) 7-Mode.

[ousturali]

the old filer is cluster mode , 8.3 ontap version , it is v32340 which  is a very old system

the new filer is Fas2720 , probably will be received with ontap 9.8 version ,

the disk assignment is ok, but i am not really sure about the snapshots of the snapvault destination volumes

we mustnot loose them , because they are the customers long time archival backup data.

anyway thanks a lot for your answers

[aborzenkov]

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@ousturali wrote:

the old filer is cluster mode , 8.3 ontap version , it is v32340 which  is a very old system

the new filer is Fas2720 , probably will be received with ontap 9.8 version ,

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v32340 is probably a typo, and "v" indicates V-Series which may not even have any shelves that can be relocated to start with.

This really goes far beyond the simple yes/no question that fits forum format, rather this is migration project to design and implement.