We have a FAS3250 that's primarily backup storage. It hosts a lot of snapmirror targets, and a few mounted filesystems with backup data.
As the hardware is getting old, we've purchased a shiny new FAS8200 with a couple of 8TB drive shelves.
We assume that the FAS8200 can be initialized on 9.2 and above using the ADP on external drives feature, to partition those 8T disks, so we don't have to throw away about 50T of storage just on the root aggregates.
However... the FAS3250 hardware can only run ontap 9.1. Newer versions of ontap are not available on that hardware. And to make the 8200 nodes join the existing cluster, it has to run the same sofware version (9.1), so... it cannot be initialized with ADP.
And you can't initialize first and partition later, because repartitioning wipes all existing data.
That's our dilemma.
I've actually tried to "manually" partition the disks, by going into maintenance mode and using "disk partition" to force the 8200 nodes to see only partitioned disks, and then re-initializing them using boot menu "4 - clean config and reinitialize disks". That fails, and 9.1 doesn't want to write a root FS to partitioned disks (it does wipe them, though). Besides, it would likely be unsupported. I did learn some interesting things about the "disk partition" command, by the way, like the "-b" blocksize is in 4k blocks, and the '-i' option that numbers partitions starts at 1, which is a data partition, and number 2 is the root partition, at least in the 2-partition root/data setup.
So we either have the option to throw away a large chunk of storage for root aggregates, initialize the new nodes on 9.1, join in cluster, and move the existing data using 'vol move' and all the cDOT goodness that comes with it.
... or build the new 8200 as a separate cluster, initialize it with 9.3, partition the disks via the boot menu, and then move the data over using snapmirror, and remounting the clients. That's doable because most of the data is snapmirror target anyway, and there's a limited number of mounted filesystems that would need a remount. It's a shame that cDOT doesn't have "snapmirror migrate" like 7mode did.
Does anyone have any other options? All I could think is get swing gear and basically do the migration twice, first to hardware that supports ontap >= 9.2, then to our new 8200. But I'm not willing to spend a lot of money renting the swing gear and getting a lot of extra setup work basically because of a flaw in netapp software.
Thanks,
--
Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc@xs4all.nl>
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
- Grey's Law
As the hardware is getting old, we've purchased a shiny new FAS8200 with a couple of 8TB drive shelves.
We assume that the FAS8200 can be initialized on 9.2 and above using the ADP on external drives feature, to partition those 8T disks, so we don't have to throw away about 50T of storage just on the root aggregates.
However... the FAS3250 hardware can only run ontap 9.1. Newer versions of ontap are not available on that hardware. And to make the 8200 nodes join the existing cluster, it has to run the same sofware version (9.1), so... it cannot be initialized with ADP.
And you can't initialize first and partition later, because repartitioning wipes all existing data.
That's our dilemma.
I've actually tried to "manually" partition the disks, by going into maintenance mode and using "disk partition" to force the 8200 nodes to see only partitioned disks, and then re-initializing them using boot menu "4 - clean config and reinitialize disks". That fails, and 9.1 doesn't want to write a root FS to partitioned disks (it does wipe them, though). Besides, it would likely be unsupported. I did learn some interesting things about the "disk partition" command, by the way, like the "-b" blocksize is in 4k blocks, and the '-i' option that numbers partitions starts at 1, which is a data partition, and number 2 is the root partition, at least in the 2-partition root/data setup.
So we either have the option to throw away a large chunk of storage for root aggregates, initialize the new nodes on 9.1, join in cluster, and move the existing data using 'vol move' and all the cDOT goodness that comes with it.
... or build the new 8200 as a separate cluster, initialize it with 9.3, partition the disks via the boot menu, and then move the data over using snapmirror, and remounting the clients. That's doable because most of the data is snapmirror target anyway, and there's a limited number of mounted filesystems that would need a remount. It's a shame that cDOT doesn't have "snapmirror migrate" like 7mode did.
Does anyone have any other options? All I could think is get swing gear and basically do the migration twice, first to hardware that supports ontap >= 9.2, then to our new 8200. But I'm not willing to spend a lot of money renting the swing gear and getting a lot of extra setup work basically because of a flaw in netapp software.
Thanks,
--
Jan-Pieter Cornet <johnpc@xs4all.nl>
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
- Grey's Law
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