An alternative to dump/restore is "vol copy". You can copy to a larger volume, but not to a smaller one. Vol copy is much faster than a level 0 dump/restore or ndmpcopy because it is a raw block copy rather than a copy by file. If you have to remain up during the vol copy, you'll need to use something like rsync afterward to pick up the changes. But if you can afford 3 or 4 hours of downtime, that's probably all you need to copy your 4 shelves of 9G drives, assuming at least 100Mb between the two filers. Another advantage of vol copy -- it can preserve snapshots, which dump/restore cannot do.
To use vol copy you need two volumes on the target filer temporarily, but you can still end up with one volume. Set up the target filer with a minimal root volume. Also create the target volume, and offline it. After the vol copy, "rootify" the target volume, offline the temporary root volume and reboot. The filer comes up on the new root volume. Delete the temporary root volume and add its disks to the new root.
To "rootify", copy the system files from the temporary root volume to the target volume, and use the "vol rename" and "vol options root" commands.
See the na_vol man page for details.
Hi guys,
I've been mulling over migration strategies, and babysitting a migration from a F520 with four shelves of 9gb disks to an F740 with three shelves of 36Gb disks.
It's a pain.
ndmpcopy works great for level 0, but has had problems with level 1 copies in my experience. So I'm using rsync 2.4.6 to do the level 1 copies of data to keep things upto date. But it tends to hang, so I have to babysit it all the time. Not good.
Now I know I could use snapmirror to make this migration painless, but that would mean that I'd have to dedicate two 36gb disks on my F740 to the root volume, and then make a second volume with the remaining disks, leaving one spare of course. So I'm losing capacity, but I'm starting to think that this is the way to go, if only to keep my sanity.
And I have another migration to do from an F330 to an F740 with one shelf of disks. In that case, I *really* don't want to dedicate two 35Gb disks to the root vol, and the rest are in a data volume.
So what should I do?
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support