On 19/01/2012, at 10:34 AM, Simon Ogilvie wrote:
Good question! No there are no new disk shelves - I'd planned to swap one head in first, using the existing root vol, and keeping the shelf layout as is, then add the second head afterwards, but it hadn't occured to me that I'll need a second root vol. As I have both SATA and FC shelves, I was expecting one head to be "master" for each disk type, with failover to the other, so I guess the root vols will be one on each?
This will be tricky. Under an active/active cluster, the disks have to have software ownership enabled, and each disk (not shelf) is owned by one of the two controllers. Chances are that your old system uses hardware-based ownership, the two are not compatible though it is possible to convert between them.
You certainly want a good, accessible, backup of all of your data before attempting to do any of this. You will be doing tricky things in maintenance mode, with mistakes being fatal to your data.
It may be worth considering renting a shelf or two so you can set up the second controller on that, then migrating the data back to the shelves you own. You will also need to know a lot more about OnTAP than a "typical" NetApp administrator might.
Professional Services could well be worth the cost...