How to Snapmirror to an external drive?

[peter1965]

Hello,

instead of me clogging the WAN (or throttling the snapmirror) I wish to snapmirror (initialize) approx 800GB to a v6210 series over the WAN but I dont want it to take for ever because of throttling and dont want to chock the circuits on our MPLS WAN traffic. My preference is to do the initial snap mirror initialize to an external drive such as USB Drive then ship that drive to the remote location to snap or put  onto the 6210. Then the idea would be to turn on snapmirror from the remote site to the 6210 after the data has been put onto the 6210 with the usb drive to just snap the delta. I suppose (seed the data first from the usb drive. THoughts? Ideas? Hints or tips appreciate..

How does one go about doing this? Step by step would be nice

both san are running in 8.0.1 7 mode

vseries 6210 would be the destination

and the remote site has a 3210

[BrendonHiggins]

Hi

You need to use snapmirror to tape.

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel801/html/ontap/onlinebk/GUID-46E73E66-F6EA-465C-A722-C7A186C7C39C.html

Let me know if you need more.

Bren

[peter1965]

I think that should be a great start... Unless there is more since you offered ?

[paulstringfellow]

Sadly this is not something you can do…SnapMirror to tape is your only way when doing a volume SnapMirror of preseeding the destination, your other options if you are using Qtree SnapMirror is to use LREP, which should let you do this, although LREP is really designed for OSSV seeding rather than SnapMirror, however if you are using Qtrees it may be an option and will allow a copy to disk.

SnapMirror for tape though as suggested is the baby for now…

Should really be something NetApp add to their portfolio to allow simple seeding…

[scottgelb]

There is a brute force way that might work.. you can SnapMirror to TAPE - to a file in another volume in diag mode (haven't tried this in a while, but used to work and likely still does).  You could then copy that file and snapmirror it back.  For example, snapmirror a volume called "sourcevol" to a target “mirrorvol” qtree "mirrordump" with the dump file name "sm2t-disk".  /vol/mirrorvol needs more free space than the backup will take...should be able to copy that file then restore..but needs 2x+ the space on disk and copying multiple times.

priv set diag

qtree create /vol/mirrorvol/mirrordump

snapmirror store sourcevol /vol/mirrorvol/mirrordump/sm2t-disk

[scottgelb]

With 8.0.1, try "priv set diag; smtape backup sourcevol /vol/mirrorvol/mirrordump/sm2t-disk"... if you can create another volume slightly larger on the source and target you could copy the sm2t-disk file and use that as a workaround to get the file (level0 mirror image) on the usb disk.