Okay, I get what you are asking. It's a bit hairy, but I get why you'd want to do it. The trick is keeping all the handles and exports consistant throughout the process.
It's worth calling in and filing an RFE. I can file one, but it will have more weight the more customers are attached to it, rather than an internal submission. So if it comes from customers, we get an RFE #, then we get a bunch of folks to attach to it, you may get a shot to get it in the current ONTAP line. No promises, though. I can't speak for Engineering.
Of course, the newly released ONTAP GX does this plus more. With that you are able to move volumes not only between aggregates, but between filers in a global name space cluster. Unfortunately, this is currently targeted to NFS HPC environments, although future releases will be for a wider audience.
-- Adam Fox adamfox@netapp.com
-----Original Message----- From: Glenn Dekhayser [mailto:gdekhayser@voyantinc.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 10:11 AM To: Carl Howell; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
I would think that this would be a fairly common need, especially for larger shops with big Netapps.
Given the new 6000 series that can have thousands of drives, and that different volumes (especially ones containing luns) have vastly different I/O requirements, you would definitely want to be able to transparently move a flexvol from a smaller aggregate with fewer available iops to a larger aggregate where the flexvol can benefit from more or different RPM spindles. Currently this operation requires unacceptable levels of application downtime for a 24/7 global enterprise.
One can extend this feature by having multiple filers communicate with one another, handing off FC/iSCSI target responsibility for migrated luns to another head altogether. This of course would be trickier and require coordination with the host initiator, but hey, isn't that why we have SnapDrive? :) Within a single filer head I would imagine this would not be required. Across heads it would.
I smell a great RFE!
Glenn (the other one).
-----Original Message----- From: Carl Howell [mailto:chowell@uwf.edu] Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 9:57 AM To: Glenn Dekhayser; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
What Glenn is suggesting below is what I'm looking for. We have quite a few FlexVol's that live in FC aggregates today that I would like to move to SATA aggregates and don't want to have to SnapMirror or copy them to get it done.
- Carl
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Glenn Dekhayser Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 9:08 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
What I would have imagined is something like VMWare's Vmotion, which moves an entire system from one physical system to another. Since the aggregates are on the same system, we wouldn't have the issue of snapmirror making a 'new' volume. The process would be as such:
1) Make baseline copy to new volume on new aggregate with separate name (snapshot will suffice); 2) Do a once/min snapshot until lag < 60 sec. 3) Change to a semi-sync snapmirror 4) Change to a sync mirror 5) Once in sync, in the OS 'swap' the handles for the primary and mirror volumes (since they are in effect the same data now) so that data is now served from the mirror. 6) Once swap is complete, break the mirror and (optionally) remove the old volume.
I think this is what everyone wants! Heck, combine this with FlexShare and you've got automatic load balancing!
Glenn (the other one)
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of George, Andrew Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 8:00 PM To: John Clear; Fox, Adam; Carl Howell; Greg Wilson Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
Err...I would have thought syncmirror would have been the way to go in that case I'd rather manually move the connections anyway rather than rely on an automated process And I'd especially not like to see the old copy getting deleted before I've had a chance to make sure the customers are happy
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of John Clear Sent: Tuesday, 20 June 2006 9:06 AM To: Fox, Adam; Carl Howell; Greg Wilson Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
What I'd like to see is a way to move a live volume between aggregates. This would be especially useful on my R200s, since the aggregates and volumes are quite large. Ideally, something like 'vol move volname aggr0 aggr1' would move the volume without any interruptions on the client side.
My understanding is that vol copy takes a snapshot, and then transfers that, which means any changes that occur after the copy is started are not transferred. The only way around that is to make sure the volume isn't mounted/accessed, which is often an unacceptable amount of down time.
Between snapmirror and vol clone/copy, the code to do this appears to be mostly there already. The only piece missing is doing the live cutover between the old volume and new volume.
John
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Fox, Adam Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 8:43 AM To: Carl Howell; Greg Wilson Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
Perhaps the toaster community could better define what you want from a proposed vol move command that you aren't getting currently from vol copy?
-- Adam Fox adamfox@netapp.com
-----Original Message----- From: Carl Howell [mailto:chowell@uwf.edu] Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 9:35 AM To: Greg Wilson Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
I would like to see a move operation added to the vol command. Does anyone know if this will ever be available?
Thanks,
- Carl
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Greg Wilson Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 12:23 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: moving a flex vol to a new aggr ?
hey all
i need to move a flex vol from one aggregate to another aggregate on the same filer
is there a really simple command like
vol move <volname> aggr1 aggr2
if not what would be the easiest way to move the flex vol to a new aggregate?
vol copy ?
thanks
gw