I'm not against the model number since it gives info on the NVRAM and requirements for that system...but it should be included like you said with 6+ months and also there should be release notes that state when a model is not supported or is supported. vFiler Data Motion feature is a great feature but has many limits including a lock in 7.3.3/.4/.5 to even use it. Many customers wanted to upgrade to 8 so we are limited in the 7.3.3+ code line only... and the recent 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 releases allowed 7.3.4 and 7.3.5 to work. 8.1 will add support into the code line and will be the next version of this feature.
The Data Motion for vFiler requirements are listed in TR-3814 http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3814.pdf
Data Motion Summary
• Data Motion is a guaranteed 120 second vfiler migrate for no downtime movement of vFiler units between physical controllers using NFS and iSCSI (CIFS needs to reconnect similar to a cluster failover). Applications run uninterrupted or “always-on” during the migration.
• Use cases are scheduled maintenance, outages, technology refresh, load balancing, adjusting storage tiers, etc.
Data Motion Rules and Requirements
• Destination System NVRAM must be the same size or larger (no rollback if larger) than source
• No migration between heads in an HA pair
• No migration from Faster RPM to Slower RPM disks but can go from Slower to Faster RPM (but no rollback if not the same speed)
• No single controllers on source or destination (must be on a HA pair)
• vFiler source must own all volumes (not just the qtree)
• Data ONTAP 7.3.3 or greater 7.3.x release
• Operations Manager 4.0+
o Provisioning Manager 4.0+
• Does not work on vfiler0
• Host Protocols Supported
o NFS
o iSCSI
• Host Protocols NOT Supported
o FCP, FCoE (only allowed in vFiler0)
o CIFS (it works, but users have to reconnect similar to a cluster failover)
• ONTAP licenses
o MultiStore
o SnapMirror, SnapMirror_sync (free with snapmirror)
