The process of converting a 7-Mode system to Cluster-Mode is neither trivial nor supported (or more importantly - documented).  In addition, you would need fairly recent systems since Cluster-Mode is only available for 64-bit systems.  You would need at least two systems but four would be better.

If you just want a chance to see how Cluster-Mode works and to get a feel for it, you are best off to download a simulator as John suggests.  You can create as many as you want to make a bigger Cluster but four simulators would be enough.  A two-node cluster is okay but not very indicative of how a Cluster was designed to work.  One system is not a cluster and thus would not allow you to understand how Cluster-Mode works.

The simulators don't support what is "now-a-days" called high-availability, which means that two-nodes in the cluster are cabled together (like what used to be called CFO on 7-Mode) such that if one controller fails, the other controller can take over its disks.  That is okay for testing and you'll still be able to test the other features.

If you want to experiment with real hardware, you would have switches for the Cluster network and you would also have a separate management network  and a network for data.  The cluster network is a special switch configuration.  Although, you can share when testing, you need all three networks in a production environment.  

Just some things to think about.

--April



----- Forwarded Message -----
From: John Stoffel <john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com>
To: tmac <tmacmd@gmail.com>
Cc: toasters@teaparty.net
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: switching between cluster mode and 7 mode


tmac> It is not terribly bad, but the filesystems are not compatible
tmac> at all.  ALL data is wiped/disks are zero'd

tmac> Plus you need to get license keys from NetApp for cluster mode.
tmac> Set some environment variables.

tmac> Make sure you have proper networking...  i.e. 2 x Cisco 5010
tmac> switches solely for the cluster backend and 2 x Cisco 2960
tmac> switches for the administration network and then whatever
tmac> networking you want to add on top of that for your data
tmac> network(s).

This seems amazingly excessive.  You can't use those same two Cisco
5010s for boththe cluster *and* the management?  It's got 20 10gib/s
ethernet ports, how many do you need for the backend? 

tmac> Make sure you have multi-path storage properly configured.

tmac> You are best off getting the simulator and playing with that for
tmac> a while to see how it goes. The downside to the simulator is
tmac> that it now longer supports ha mode (it did way back in 7.x
tmac> days, but not not so much) so you end up with two single nodes
tmac> with now sfo/cfo capability.

I assume you meant "no sfo/cfo" instead?  But could you please explain
sfo/cfo as well?  Is that 'single failover/cluster failover' like I
suspect?  I'm certainly motivated to spin up the simulator to start
getting used to this new OS and to see how it would impact us if/when
we upgrde our existing systems.

John
    John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
  Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
        john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com - 508-486-1087
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