September 10, 2010

Cascading SnapMirror, removing the middle NetApp

Recently had a customer who had a SnapMirror relationship between their primary filer in their datacenter and a filer in their DR location.  The link between the two was very slow and  we were upgrading the filer in the DR site.  The customer was concerned about having to re-baseline and send all of the volume data over the WAN as it would take weeks to complete.  The other option was to bring the new filer to the production site and initialize the SnapMirror relationship and move it back to the DR site after the initial transfer.  Due to other factors this wasn’t an option either.

As it turns out, with SnapMirror this is actually a painless process.  The layout was something like this:

cascade_snapmirror

Say for example that filer1 transfers to filer2 at the top of every hour, I setup a SnapMirror between filer2 and filer3 to kick off at :30 after the hour.  The process was something like this:

snapmirror update snapvol on filer2 to send any changes since the last SnapMirror

snapmirror quiesce snapvol on filer2 to make the SnapMirror relationship idle

snapmirror update snapvol on filer3 to send the changes from filer2 to filer3

snapmirror quiesce snapvol on filer3 to make the SnapMirror relationship idle

snapmirror break snapvol on filer2

snapmirror break snapvol on filer3

Update the snapmirror.conf file on filer3 so that it is going from filer1 to filer3 now

snapmirror resync snapvol Resync the broken SnapMirror relationship with filer1 and filer3

snapmirror update snapvol Send any changes from filer1 snapvol to filer3 snapvol

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About mike
I am currently a Systems Engineer working for a NetApp/VMware/HP VAR in the Twin Cities, MN area. My professional summary is available via my LinkedIn page. I can be contacted by the Contact Me link at the top of the site. I also spend (too much) time on Twitter so feel free to follow or send me a tweet.

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