Here's a brainstorm I came up with that might be useful...but requires Snapvault licenses. Maybe NetApp could offer us demo licenses to those who want to migrate from traditional to flex-volumes.

**** EARLY MORNING THEORY ONLY **** license snapvault on all the filers you want to migrate, as well as the new 7.x filer running with flex-volumes.

set up snapvault schedules that coincide with your regularly scheduled hourly,nightly,weekly snapshots.

turn off snap sched and rely on snapvault snap sched.

wait x number of weeks until you've cycled through your normal snapshot retention schedule.

Caveats: - Completely theoretical and untested by me - Time to migrate is lengthy - QSM has performance issues with millions of files

On Mon, 15 May 2006, Glenn Walker wrote:

Andrew is right on the money. There are no mirroring operations supported between flex and trad vols (beyond QSM, which will not help with snapshots).

Documentation from NetApp on the subject:

http://now.netapp.com/NOW/knowledge/docs/ontap/rel701r1_gf/html/ontap/mg mtsag/6vol12.htm#1390988

I wish there were a better way - perhaps one day (don't hold your breath, though).

Glenn

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From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of George, Andrew Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 7:53 PM To: Steven Mandrake; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Upgrade 270 and keep snapshots for snapmirror

Hi

I think the choices are

use trad vols and keep snapshots

use flex vols and loose snapshots

As you can't mirror from a flex vol to a trad vol, what we wound up doing was ndmpcopying the data, mirroring the tradvol (and snapshots) nightly, and then we cut over to the new box, initializing a second mirror - then when our last snapshot from the trad vol was expired, we destroyed the traditional mirror volume.

Sorry, I was facing the same thing and couldn't come up with a better way of doing it than what I outlined

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From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Steven Mandrake Sent: Tuesday, 16 May 2006 7:21 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Upgrade 270 and keep snapshots for snapmirror

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to upgrade from 6.5 to 7.0.4 and I currently have trad vols. I also have another filer that is hosting my snapmirrors of many trad vols.

My goal is to upgrade both filers to 7.0.4 to take advantage of flexvols.

I want to preserve my snapshots and have those moved as well. So ndmpcopy is out for me.

volcopy preserves my snapshots, but I can't seem to get it to work between trad vols and flex vols.

Is there a way I can do the following:

1. upgrade to 7G source and destination

2. Migrate from trad vol to flex while preserving my snapshots

3. update my snapmirror w/o re-initalizing the mirror.

I don't have Acopia or Neopath either. Are there tools w/in NetAPP that can help me?