Suggestions for establishing inital snapmirror at remote sites

[lanceboon]

I've looked around the now site and see that there are a few options for this, what I would like to do is to be able to use an external usb drive and write that volume out to it then ship it to my remote site from what I've read so far lrep can do this??? I am pretty new with this so any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Source and destination files are fas2020's

[satheesh1]

lrep tools very good method for establishing sv & qsm relationships. I've used in the past successfully. I'd recommend this approach. But lrep doesn't handle VSM, if you are planning to use, there is way to do using filer shelves.

Lemme know which are you planning to do & how much data to mirror

Satty

[lanceboon]

What I have so far is several volumes that I would like to get over to our remote site basically whats on those volumes are just vmdk files on several test virtual machines. The biggest volume right now is about 500 gb and we don't have any spare shelves at this point in time either.

[satheesh1]

If you are planning to use VSM & don't have spare shelves, It's bit tricky, but its possible.

Take 3 or more disks on the remote site & create a RAID 4 aggr of maximum possible capacity.  Create a volume inside that aggr & use it as SM destination. Then ship these disks to your site & add it the Filer. Filer might detect as foreign aggregate, change it appropriately. Then change the /etc/snapmirror.conf on the src & dest accordingly.

Above method is high level ides & leave it to you to figure tiny little steps that are needed to complete

Satty

[pascalduk]

satheesh1 wrote:
Above method is high level ides & leave it to you to figure tiny little steps that are needed to complete

Just some things to consider.

You can't pull out the disks of specific 1 aggregate from a running filer. If an aggregate disappears the filer will panic. And offlining an aggregate still containing flex vols is not possible, unless you are in maintenance mode. Therefore you will need down time on the source filer.

You also have to consider software ownership on the disks. If the source and destination filer run software ownership, you need to change/remove the ownership at one point with down time.

[radek_kubka]

The simplest possible method would be to put filers next to each other (on the same LAN), do the baseline transfer & then ship a filer to a remote destination.

If that's not an option (filers are already at remote offices & cannot be brought back), then the other way is to use SnapMirror to tape (SM2T) for initial seeding.

Regards,
Radek

[lanceboon]

That's kind of what I thought I might have to do, I've never setup a snap mirror to tape before and trying to figure out that is driving me nuts, do you have to have fibre channel tape drives to setup the sm2t. I've gone through the http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel707/html/ontap/onlinebk/mirror29.htm here and am just confused on how the tape drives actually get attached to the filers.

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel7261/html/ontap/tapebkup/protecting/concept/c_oc_prot_tape-drive-management.html#c_oc_prot_tape-driv...

From what I can see right now probably the easiest thing for me to do would be to bring that filer back to my main site and establish the mirrors that way, what way would you recommend in the future in the following scenario. I've got say 20 snapmirror relationships between the primary and remote site, I create a new vm that has say a 80gb vmdk files in one of those snapmirror relationships how could I get that off to my remote site without waiting a month for the snapmirror to do its job?  Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.