We've always used SnapMirror for our data migration needs. But when we talked to our NetApp rep about planning our migration from traditional volumes to flex vols he recommended ndmpcopy (SnapMirror wouldn't work for us). We used ndmpcopy to migrate from a FAS250 with traditional volumes to a FAS270 with flex vols. Worked beautifully.
Next month I'll be doing the same thing to migrate from an F820 to a FAS3020. Level 0 ndmcopy to lay down the base, level 1 to copy the week's changes and then shutdown the necessary services and a final level 2 to pick up the last of the changes. That should minimize our downtime.
On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 09:47:03PM +0200, Steve Pitts wrote:
I am looking to get a feel for what people think is the best way to copy traditional volumes to flex volumes when I upgrade to 7G. Currently I SnapMirror my 960C production volumes and qtrees to a local R150 and a coop R150 located several hundred miles away. I know I need to update the R150 before upgrading the 960C. On my R150 I should have enough space to build a large aggregate to put multiple flex volumes in. I will be able to delete a couple of the traditional volumes to free up more disk once copied into the flex volume. I am leaning toward using ndmpcopy to copy the traditional copies to flex volumes. I'm not sure what performance/speed I will get out of using ndmp. I am open to suggestions if anyone has a better way of doing this. Thanks, Steve Pitts General Dynamics