A small comment on the
plan below. The command to set the root aggregate
(step 4) gives an error:
Filer1> aggr
options aggr1 root
aggr options: option 'root' can be modified only in maintenance mode
This isn’t a problem though since
you just need to set the root volume.
The root aggregate will change automatically upon reboot.
And just a generally comment on the
Netapp size “recommendation” for a flexible root vol. I’ve seen three different docs
that discuss the size of the root vol.
One suggested 30GB, two others said you should
use something around 90GB. All those
suggestions are patently insane.
I keep 3 months works of root vol snapshots; the total size is somewhere around
300MB. A few gigs should easily be
enough to handle most situations.
I don’t understand what the people who wrote the docs were
thinking.
-C.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On
Behalf Of Palmer, Jason (EMEA)
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005
5:49 AM
To: 'Adam McDougall';
toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: RE: converting root
volume to flexvol
Hi Adam,
I successfully moved to a root volume on a flexible
volume within an aggregate last week without any problems...
I used ndmpcopy from the command line of the filer and
followed the steps below -
1. Create the Aggregate
(In our case a 3 disk root aggregate called AGGR)
2.
Create new flexible root volume within that aggregate (I called this rootnew as
we already have a root volume)
3.
NDMPCOPY -l 0 -f <filer>:/vol/root/etc <filer>:/vol/newroot/etc
4.
aggr options aggr root <--
To set the aggr aggregate to the root aggregate
5.
vol options newroot root <-- To
set the rootnew volume to the root volume
6.
Reboot the filer and verify everything comes back up OK (If not you can boot in
maintenance mode to reset the root volume)
7. Check that newroot in
aggr is the root volume using vol status
8. If
this is the case, rename root volume to rootold and rootnew to root
9.
Use vol offline rootold to ofline the old root volume and if 100% happy use the
vol destroy
Worked fine for us - I only used the NetApp KB as a
guideline.
I have another 5 machines to convert in the same way -
I was lucky, as the first system I did was not storing production data so there
were plenty of disks and no pressure of system downtime to consider.
I hope this helps,
Jason Palmer
Storage Architecture
MCI EMEA
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com
[mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]On
Behalf Of Adam McDougall
Sent: 02 March 2005 12:37
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: converting root volume to
flexvol
I am asking the list because documentation on this
process seems to be
inconsistant or light in nature on
the NOW website.
Background:
When we setup our Filer, vol0
spanned 24 data disks and contained "etc".
The original filer, an F820, booted
from this. We've since upgraded to
FAS940 and Data ONTAP 7.0 and I
want to migrate root to a flexvol.
We also have a new disk shelf, so I
set it up as aggr0 and already have
some production flexvols running
from it for data. I created a flexvol
named root on aggr0. I want
to move the root from vol0 to this new flexvol
so I can destroy vol0 (which is
larger now and has no remaining production
qtrees) and create a second
aggregate with the 3 disk shelves that would
be freed.
Problem:
Several articles, such as Solution
ID: kb5856 make it sound like you
need to copy etc into /aggr0/newvol
instead of /vol/newvol. It also
demonstrates that the newly created
/vol/newvol appears empty after
this. Why would you do it
that way? Is it an ndmpcopy/rootvol thing
that you would want to do
this? I have successfully migrated normal
data from traditional volumes to
flex volumes using various combinations
of ndmpcopy, tar, and rsync.
Copies that complete successfully work fine.
Other articles such as Solution ID: kb5634 make the
procedure sound
simpler yet more vague: "1.
From an Admin host that has access to both
traditional vol0 and the new root
volume copy the entire /etc directory
over to the new volume.
" This I can easily handle, but I want to
be fairly certain that it will
actually boot from the new root vol
after doing "vol options root
root".
I also want to put boot files on the new aggr/root
disks so I can boot
from that shelf incase I need to
replace my compactflash card.
Would 'download' do the right thing
and place the boot files on
the new disk shelf as long as I
have set "vol options root root"?
Has anyone done something similar, and how large did
you make your
new root volume? NetApp
webpages have widely varying examples varying
from 14g to recommendations of 30g
or 90g. Our /etc is only 0.25 gigs
and I wouldn't expect coredumps to
consume more disk space than the filer
has memory, and if my filer decides
to start coredumping frequently then
I will be thinking about the disk
space and expanding it, since I can.