ONTAP intentionally will shut down a controller if an NVRAM card isn't being charged. This is for data protection. If you do not have power to your NVRAM card and a dirty shutdown were to occur, data loss could happen so the idea is to do a clean shutdown so that all dirty pages are written to disk. In the case of a cluster, being taken over is a great solution because the controller can keep running until you get a replacement NVRAM card and can give control back to the controller with a working NVRAM card.
There are unsupported ways of stopping the shutdown behavior, but they are not published and not supported because of the data loss possibility. NetApp will not recommend or support running a controller in a config that, by design, could lose data. I strongly suggest running the cluster in takeover mode until the new card is in and charged. It's precisely for reasons like this that people buy clustered configurations, it removes single points of failure such as an NVRAM card.
-- Adam Fox Systems Engineer adamfox@netapp.com
From: Zeeshan [mailto:xischaune@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 2:32 PM To: Toasters List Subject: NVRAM Battery Failure
Hello all... recently i ran into a strange problem...i have a fas 3040 in active-active configuration...everything running fine untill one fine morning the NVRAM charging stopped...the filer gave warning messages and then out of a sudden halted...and then the failover tookover the filer... now the problem is that i dont want the cluster to takeover...since netapp has promised replacements within 5 days...when i disable failover after some time, the filer automatically halts/shut down... how can i disable this auto shutting down...and has anybody else have this NVRAM charging failure??? reasons ofr this???
Thanx