Jan-Pieter,
We have a NearStore at another site. It started life as a 7.3.2 system and was later upgraded to 8.01. When it was 7x, they used all the disks except hot spares in existing aggregates. When they upgraded to 8.x and got more shelves, they used all the new disks and put them into a 64 bit, 30 TB aggregate.
They are now running out of space in the 32 bit aggregate and need to move something to the 64 bit aggregate. They do not have a SM license and it appears everything else that can migrate snapshots as well as the data will not work between mixed bit aggregates.
The need to add at least 1 disk into the 32 bit aggregate to enable it to convert to 64 bit requires using one of the hot spares. Obviously we can't pull that disk back out of the aggregate. Adding one disk to a raid group will create a hot disk unless you reallocate all of the volumes in the aggregate. That is why it would be more convenient not to have to add drives in order to convert the bit level.
If they did have more drives they could add enough disks to make a reasonable raid group and convert it. Unfortunately they don't have enough left over disks.
Jeff
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Jan-Pieter Cornet johnpc@xs4all.nl wrote:
On 2011 Oct 19, at 20:36 , Jeff Cleverley wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Does anyone know if NetApp plans to change the process anytime in the future? An "aggr modify 64bit-upgrade" would be really nice :-)
What exactly does a 64 bit aggr buy you if it also fits in a 32 bits aggr (as it obviously currently does)? (Besides wasting more space for metadata).
I think the whole point of 64 bit aggrs is to be able to be able to expand beyond 16T/aggr. If your current aggr is smaller than that... what's the benefit of going to 64 bit?
I've starting playing around with the 8.1 RC1 release. I want to upgrade some aggregates from 32 bit to 64 bit. From what I can tell, the only way to do this is to add additional disks to an existing aggregate. Is that correct?
I've got one filer with limited disks and don't want to add 1 additional disk to a raid group. I don't want to do all the associated reallocates to smooth out the data allocation.
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