Hi,
We are looking to upgrade our 2 FAS940's from Ontap 6.5.5 to Ontap 7.2.3. We currently use traditional volumes and want to migrate them all to Flex volumes once Ontap has been upgraded, at present we have approx 4TB of data however we do not have sufficient free space to create new aggregates and flex volumes to copy the data in to before destroying the original trad volumes and converting them to agregates therefore we have purchased 2 additional shelves which will give us space to do this (once the upgrades are finished we plan to attach one of the extra shelfs to each filer), the (abbreviated) plan for each filer is to:
1. shutdown all production services 2. break the synchronous snapmirrors 3. connect the shelves 4. upgrade the disk firmwares to the latest levels 5. upgrade to Ontap 7.2.3 6. create an aggregate on the 2 new shelves 7. as the data in the volumes are in qtrees QSM them to the new aggregate 8. once the data copy is complete, destroy the existing volumes and create the aggregates and new volumes 9. QSM the data back to the new aggregate 10. destroy the volumes on the new shelfs and remove them
repeat steps 3 through 9 above for the other Filer remove one of the new shelves reinistialize the synchronous snapmirrors job done?
One area I am not sure of is when do I upgrade the root volume (vol0), should this be done at step 6 above?, if so should I just create a new volume called for example vol0_new, copy the contents of vol0 in to it and then rename the orig vol0 to vol0_orig and rename vol0_new to vol0 and then reboot the filer for it to the new volume up before starting step 7?
Also does anyone have any rough guidelines on how long it would take to snapmirror 4TB to a new shelf(s)?
I am relatively new to NetApp technologies so would appreciate it if you guys would have a look over the steps above and highlight things I may need to be aware of I would appreciate it.
Many thanks
Bryan