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.