Can you migrate an iscsi lif?

[James_Goodison]

Hi All, 

I'm doing a piece of work where we have installed two new controllers in to our production six node cluster and im moving all the storage and anything the first four nodes host to the new nodes.

The majority of our virtual machines and storage are presented via iscsi. Its come to my attention that I would need to create new lifs on the new nodes, which means i would then have to configure each virtual machine with the new entry IP for iscsi which would be a pain. The easiest and quickest solution would be for us to migrate the iscsi lif thats on node1 to node 5/6. Not sure if this is possible. - if its possible would it cause any downtime or disruption to any services etc?

thanks

[TMACMD]

Regular ONTAP does not allow iSCSI LIF migration. That is only possible with ASA platforms with 9.12+ code

You can, however, move the LIF:

set advanced

net int modify -vserver abc -lif iscsi_01 -status-admin down

net int modify -vserver abc -lif iscsi_01 -home-node node-03 -home-port a0a-123 -status-admin up

That will shut the LIF down. Then move the LIF to node-03 and bring it back on.

[James_Goodison]

Hi Thanks for your help.

So from what I understand (with my limited netapp knowledge) I would basically be best doing something like this

1. Move the storage from our old controllers to our new controllers.

2. Plan an outage of all VMs and anything that connects via iscsi.

3. Shutdown all VMs

4. Move the iscsi lif (where i believe the downtime would be whilst it moves it?

5. Boot everything back up and it should just re-connect.

[TMACMD]

Almost. Move half the LIFs first, then the storage, then the remaining LIFs.

1. If you have 2 iSCSI LIFs per node
   1. Move one LIF from Node 1 to node 5
   2. Move one LIF from Node 2 to node 6
   3. Move one LIF from Node 3 to node 5
   4. Move one LIF from Node 4 to node 6
2. If you have 1 iSCSI LIFs per node (not best practice!)
   1. Move one LIF from Node 1 to node 5
   2. Move one LIF from Node 4 to node 6
   3. This will move one LIF from each HA Pair to nodes 5/6 so it is ready
   4. Best practice is TWO iSCSI LIFs per node!
3. If you are using portsets (yuck! I NEVER use them), you may need to break it up to move the LIFS!
4. If you are not using portsets, then ONTAP Selective LUN Mapping should work
5. You should be able to move any volume to Node 5/6 and maintain access
   1. By staging the LIFs as above, a LUN should always have a connection to the source and destination.
6. When complete, move the rest of the LIFs to Nodes 5 and 6.
   1. if needed, reduce to two LIFs per node. It WILL NOT hurt to have more!
7. If you do some testing, you may not even need to shutdown the VMs.
8. Optionally, you can look at exposing all paths. not getting into that now but if you do, remember to remove extra reporting nodes.

[James_Goodison]

thanks for your help - that makes sense I will investigate this. It looks like the way forward.

[chenguanghui]

hello:

    You can migrate iSCSI LIFs on all-flash SAN array (ASA) platforms running ONTAP 9.11.1 or later versions.

The migration of iSCSI LIF is limited to ports on the primary node or HA pair node.If your platform is not a full-flash SAN array (ASA) platform running ONTAP version 9.11.1 or later, you cannot migrate an iSCSI LIF from one node to another.To address this limitation, you must create an iSCSI LIF on the target node.

  Perhaps this is the answer.

Best regards.

[TMACMD]

Disagree. 
It’s agreed you cannot migrate a lif in ONTAP. However, you can shut it down and move it (I.e. re-home). You do not need to make a new lif 

once done this process too many times to count. It works. It’s also documented