Migrating from FAS2020 with 7.3.7P3 to FAS2650 with ONTAP 9.1

[behbhelpdesk]

We just got a new filer to replace our old one (small shop with two filers the other is FAS2240-4).

I have a third-party performing the migration of NFS and iSCSI datastores. The FAS2020 runs our VMWare ESX 5.5 infrastructure.

They have informed me that the only way is to do the migration is to have two periods of downtime and replace the controllers in the 2020 with NetApp loaner controllers and upgrade to 8.2.4. The FAS2020 only supports up to 7.3.7.

I am wondering if there is another way?

[aborzenkov]

First, this is data migration to new platform, so you must always plan for downtime; you can only possibly influence length and number of required downtimes. So if "another way" means "no downtime" - no, this is not possible.

As for swing gear - if using 7MTT CBT, yes - migration from 7G is qualified up to 8.2 and 2650 is supported starting with 9.1, so you cannot migrate (using 7MTT) directly. While migration can be done without using 7MTT, estimating whether it is feasible in your particular case far exceeds the scope of forum format. One thing is sure - doing this without 7MTT will irequire more manual work (and so be more error prone).

Hmm ... if your filer is used exclusively for ESXi datastores - you could simply setup new filer as additional datastore and do storage vMotion. This would be completely transparent and without downtime.

[SeanHatfield]

 +1 for storage vmotion.  Its a non-disruptive approach that doesn't care that your source system is too old to support 64bit data structures.  We can also use foreign lun import to bring over old 32bit 7mode luns in some circumstances (if there are RDMs you don't want converted to VMDK for example).  For general NAS data, you could bring it over with something like XCP.  

So headswapping to a swing gear is not the only way to get the job done, but it may still be a good approach, depending on how much non-vmware data is on the system.  7MTT does a really good job of taking a 7mode configuration, translating it to ONTAP, applying it to SVMs for you and orchestrating the data migration projects.