Hi Fambo,
there are some things you need in order to physically build a MetroCluster:
- a second chassis as the controllers must be physically seperated, otherwise HA will communicate over the backplane rather than the FC-VI card
- two FC-VI cards 16Gbit (X1928A) + SFPs
- two seperate storage stacks
You can use Cu SAS cabling. It's fully supported and sufficient in a single-rack configuration.
But the storage needs to be seperated in two stacks. ONTAP will complain in case the local and remote pool is attached to the same SAS ports.
With ONTAP 9 unmirrored aggregates will be supported. This gives you an option to use the SATA disks as well as one of the SAS shelves as unmirrored aggregate(s).
The other two SAS shelves, each in a different stack, would need to be split to 12x pool0 for the local node and 12x pool1 for the remote node. So I'd recommend to setup a RAID4 root aggregate (1+1) which would leave you with 9 disks for a RAID-DP data aggregate (7+2) and a spare per pool.
You won't need any cluster network switch as with a 2-node MCC each site is just a single-node cluster.
For that you need a second cluster base license. For a lab environment you can basically use the same license code at both sides (but that will also generate the same cluster S/N for both clusters - we have that running this way in the Customer Briefing Center in Munich without issues so far)
You should wipe the cluster and setup the 2-node MCC from scratch according to the documentation:
Clustered Data ONTAP ® 8.3 - MetroCluster ™ Installation and Configuration Guide
This would guide you through the process of configuring the controllers for 2-node MCC.
But as this is for 8.3.x, you won't be able to have unmirrored aggregates. Unfortunately I cannot point you to the ONTAP 9 docu yet. So I'd suggest to eaither wait until it's available or start off with a fully mirrored 2-node MCC in 8.3.2 and don't assign one of the SAS and the SATA shelf to any node.
regards, Niels
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