I am in a design phase of the replicate-failover-failback procedure using VSM (volume snapmirror) or QSM (qtree snapmirror) - initialize, update, break, resync, break, resync, ... The VSM resync is limited to two controllers being in the same ONTAP version and QSM resync is limited to source and destination being a qtree and not a volume.
In general case I will have two controllers with different ONTAP versions and the source data in a volume and not in a qtree.
In this situation the VSM cannot be used since ‘resync’ will fail when trying to reverse the VSM direction to the older ONTAP source. Not much luck with QSM either since it does not allow to ‘resync’ back from the qtree to the volume (the /- syntax).
The only strategy that would sort of work for the ‘general case’ (different ONTAP versions and source data in the volume not qtree) is to use QSM and move the volume data in the source volume to a new qtree before setting up replication. Still forcing this move of data to a qtree that later can be ‘resynced’ is a major pain and is intrusive for CIFS/NFS configuration of the source.
Did anybody come across this VSM (ONTAP version) and QSM (source being qtree) limitations and got a better idea?