Disks on a FAS2240

[WESLEY_REISER]

I have a FAS2240 which was shipped with two heads.  Each head is controlling 12 disks.  My situation is that I need to build out this system repeatedly (automation engineering) using only one of the heads, but I want that one head to have control of all 24 disks.  Another caveat is that I am trying to avoid having to serial into head B to remove disk ownership.  Additionally, this must be or CLI or API based and cannot rely on System Manager.  My NetApp support guy says this can be done from the command line but I haven't heard back from him in a few days with more details.  I've tried advanced mode and maintenance mode, disk remove, disk remove_ownership, disk reassign and disk assign.  Everything says I can't manage the other 12 disks because they are owned by another node.

Can this be done without having to connect to the other head?  We're not going to be using the other head at all and like I said, this is an automation process so I am trying to avoid having to hook up to it at all.  Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-Wes

[aborzenkov]

Have you tried "disk assign xx.xx -s unowned -f"?

Otherwise it is possible that you need to remove cluster license and reboot so that disks are no more associated with partner.

[jonathon_lanzon]

Hi Wes,

The short answer is, yes you can run specific commands from one controller to steal disk ownership from the other controller.

However, you need to be VERY careful when doing this. First thing is to make sure you are reassigning ownership to the other partner's spare disks. If you steal ownership from a disk assigned to one of its aggregates (or even worst, the root aggregate) you could cause some real problems for yourself.

By default the systems come shipped with 3 disk aggregates on each controller. If you are saying 12 disks are assigned to each controller, you will need to identify which 3 disks are a part of the root aggregate and which 9 disks are spares. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing this unless you are logged into the other head. Although if you are really laze you could just perform a cf takeover, run partner, followed by aggr status -r, and finished off with cf giveback.

Once you have identified which disks you want to steal ownership of just run "disk remove_ownership <disk_name>" for each of the disks you want to steal ownership of. Once you have done that, run "disk assign all".

You need to be in advanced mode to run some of these command. If you don't know how to get into advanced mode, you probably shouldn't be doing this.

Note, you won't be able to assign all 24 disks to one controller. The other controller will need 2-3 disks minimum for its root volume.

-Jonathon

[WESLEY_REISER]

Thanks for the responses guys.  After conferring with my NetApp support guy, the resolution is to remove the second controller from the system temporarily to "unlock" the disks so that they can be reassigned.

I wanted all 24 disks assigned to the primary (first) controller because we will not be using the second controller at all.  It will be a backup controller incase the primary fails.  I'm aware that this would cause downtime and I'm fine with that.