Change IP address on a DR vfiler in unconfigured status?

[AUSSIESANMAN]

Hi,

I've got to execute a vfiler failover to a DR vfiler at somepoint for DR testing. However, after closer examination, I noticed that there are two DR vfilers on the failover filer in question that somehow have been configured with identical IP addresses.

For the sake of this example, we'll call them DR vfiler1 and DR vfiler2.

e.g. -

DR vfiler1 IP : 111.222.333.444

DR vfiler2 IP : 111.222.333.444

However vfiler2 should be:  111.222.333.555

The vfiler status command shows that all the DR vfilers are currently 'unconfigured'.

I checked DNS using nslookup and discovered that the IP address for DR vfiler2 is correct in DNS (DNS states DR vfiler2 IP is 111.222.333.555).. but wrong on the vfiler setup.

I therefore need to change the IP address on DR vfiler2 BEFORE I attempt any form of DR failover testing.

My dilemma is... is there any way to change the IP address on a 'passive' DR vfiler without actually activating it?.. because I don't want it becoming the primary vfiler at this stage.  I just want to get it prepared with the correct IP address for if/when it is used for failover.

Any advice will be much appreciated,

Kevin

[mharding]

Probably won't find an answer for this one in the Admin Guide.  If no engineer or product team member responds to you on this, then I'd suggest opening a support ticket, just so you can get this resolved without risking impact to your data.   http://support.netapp.com/

[scottgelb]

You could destroy and recreate the vfiler dr with "vfiler dr configure" using the -u option to use existing mirrors.  When destroyed the vfiler volumes will go back to vfiler0, then you can use "vfiler dr configure -u" again...the -u option says to not initialize mirrors if they already exist so it will just recreate the dr vfiler from the existing mirrors.  The wizard will ask fro the IP addresses without activating the vfiler.  If an older ONTAP that doesn't support the -u option (added in 7.3.4 and also back in 8.1 releases) you can break the mirrors and manually recreate the vfiler (vfiler create -r ...-r to recreate calling the root volume which will find all other volumes) then vfiler dr resync it.

The other option is to activate the vfiler with vfiler dr activate, change the ip, then dr resync it.  Note that any vfiler dr command will recreate all snapmirror.conf entries for every 3 minutes ... 0-59/3 ... so save snapmirror.conf so you can put the original schedule back after the vfiler dr configure -u or vfiler dr resync.