Moving a volume and snapmirror consideration

[RANJBASSI]

Hi

I currently have a volume which I want to move onto my D4246 as it utilises SATA, at the moment it sits on expensive SAS storage which I want to utilise for something else.

The data on that volume is just one virtual machine hosted in our VMware environment so my plan is to storage vmotion it to the new SATA volume but the VM is quite larger (approx 3tb)

my question is though

If I create a new volume, and move the VM, what happens with SnapMirror? I assume this will not work as its tied to the original volume.

Could I break the relationship and then just let it know about the new source location.

I really want to avoid it doing a baseline transfer as this will take weeks on our WAN connection.

Any advice on this would be most appreciated.

[vims]

hi 

i think we need more clarity here. 

- snapmirror relationships  - source and destination

- how your volume with VM in it related to snapmirror?

cheers 

[RANJBASSI]

Hi

So the source snapmirror us a 3TB LUN sitting on a FAS8020 and this is snapmirrored across a WAN link to a FAS2240-4 which is the destination.

The VM in question basically just sits in a 4TB fibre LUN thin provisioned flex volume which is presented on the FAS8020.

I was wondering if the following plan would work for me to allow to reuse the existing destination volume so it doesnt need to perform a  new baseline transfer:

1. Break snapmirror relationship for flexvol concerned
2. Present new SATA flex volume to VMware
3. Perform a Storage VMotion across from SAS FlexVol to SATA flexvol, once complete
4. mark Flexvol used for previous snap mirror as offline, and rename it to reflect change
5. mark the flexvol back online.
6. Create new snapmirror relationship from the new SATA source flex volume and use the same destination volume that was used for the previous snap mirror relationship.

Hopefully if this works, I would expect it to a delta snapmirror based on the last time it did a successful snapmirror.

Would this work.

If there is any more info I need to provide please let me know, I hope I have provided enough.

Thanks

[vims]

Hello

you basically described the task i have recently completed.

I moved out of production environment to the qa/dev environment volume containing a few virtual machines.

- I snapmirrored volume, once completed

- broke snapmirror

- disconnect old volume (storage from VM ware)

- added new storage to VMware and imported VMs.

it worked seamlessly, have not encounted any problem. It was on different filer model, and different type of drives if that important for you, however it should not really matter.

cheers  

[SeanLuce · Accepted solution]

The problem here is the use of storage vMotion.  As soon as you utilize storage vMotion, the NetApp sees this as changed blocks (new data), so you will need to re-baseline your snapmirror.

If you want to prevent having to re-baseline, you need to make sure all of the snapshots make it to the new volume.  A storage vMotion will not bring the snapshots along to the new volume.

Here is the correct procedure:

SourceVol1 - Current Source Volume on SAS

SourceVol2 - New Source Volume on SATA

DestinationVol1 - Destination Volume

snapmirror update exiting relationship between SourceVol1 and DestinationVol1

snapmirror break relationship between SourceVol1 and DestinationVol1

snapmirror data from SourceVol1 to SourceVol2

Shutdown VMs

snapmirror update from SourceVol1 to SourceVol2

Remove datastore from VMware that lives on SourceVol1

Add datastore to VMware that now lives on SourceVol2

snapmirror resync between SourceVol2 and DestinationVol1 (no baseline needed)

Once you know everything worked as expected, delete SourceVol1

Here is the more official version (should have looked this up before typing all of the above 🙂

https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1368826/html/GUID-6C850BA4-E522-4F68-841F-D7E273ADE782.html

[RANJBASSI]

Many Thanks Guys for this very valuable feedback!

It makes more sense now and happy to heard that I wont need to do another baseline!