Clear disks and installing in a new filer

[DANROZ]

Hi!

I'm about to expand my cluster with two new nodes.

From reasons of lack of space, we are scraping two old filers that take 6U in the rack, inserting FAS8040 instead and connecting the disk shelfs two the new FAS.

I am considering how to wipe the data from the disks.

The first way I thought is to destroy the aggregates and raid groups, disconnect the old filers, connect the FAS8040 and initialize the disks in boot menu.

however, my workspace is not at the site of the netapp rack, so I need to prepare the disks before I go to the site to install the new FAS.

My current plan is to boot in maintenance mode in the old filers, destroy the aggregates and raid groups, assign all the disks as spares and zero them. The next day I will go to the site, install the new filer at the site. The only problem I can think of is the wheter the fact that the disks will be spares in another filer (owned by another filer) will effect the install.

I would be happy to hear your opinions

Thanks,

Dan

[robinpeter · Accepted solution]

You zero the disks before or not zeroing them.. dosen't matter

While you initialaize the controller using Option 4 from boot menu, it will select & assign the disks (usually 3 disks) and zero them again,

before creating an aggr, then creating the root volume.

Depend on the ontap version you choose, the remaining disk can be auto-assigned by the controller (but you can always change it)

Normally i connect only the shelf, where i want my root aggr and complere the initilization process. 

halt the controller and then boot the controller to maintnanace mode.

Once controlelrs are in manintnance mode, ill complete the remaining SAS cabling  (depends on the number of loop needed)

and then complete the disk assignment on each loop.

Once all the SAS cabling is according to the recommendation, reboot the controller to do the remaining configuration.

Remember to change the environment variable "bootarg.init.boot_clustered" if the controller was previusly used in 7-mode.

To make things lil easy, remove all disks ownership before you disconnect them from 7-Mode controller. (if it was previously attached to 7-Mode controller)

Please let me know, if i can provide additional information.

robin.