Sunday, January 08, 2006

Netapp Upgrade

Part 1 : Ontap + Adding disk shelves

This was the second ONTAP upgrade within a years length. This time around we added two SATA disk
shelves and upgraded to ONTAP 7.0.3 to get the benefits of flexvol.

ONTAP upgrade was pretty simple, we just downloaded the software for FAS900 series from now.netapp.com and extracted it in a particular directory.

The root of the filer (vol0) was mounted on /mnt

./install_netapp -k /mnt

The upgrade was smooth, as simple as copying files.

we then connected a laptop to the NAS filer, on the filer prompt

Disabled the autosupport, since this was a scheduled downtime

Disabled the cluster with the following command

cf disable

The executables need to be copied to the boot blocks of the filer

download

A message would appear informing that the boot blocks were sucessfully copied to the disks.

and fired the halt command. The system came to the
ok:prompt

Fired the bye command to reboot
ok bye

On the other filer perform the same upgrade.

We then connected each disk shelf to each to one controller. There was no interconnect since cf is disable.

Checked whether the new set of disks could be detected by the filer using
sysconfig -a

Upgraded the disk firmware, this firmware is packaged with the new ONTAP upgrade.

disk_fw_update

Enabled the cluster

cf enable

Interconnect the new disk shelves to either filers.

Part 2: Creating Aggregate volumes.

Aggregates are the new feature that was enabled as a result of the ONTAP upgrade. We created a 14 disk aggregate with 13 disks. Sounds confusing but I'll try explain

We purchased a 2 x 14 disk shelves, one disk needs to be a spare as a Best practice policy (A good point to be noted is that spares are'nt global), so effectively we had 13 disks. The Aggregate options normally recommend 6-14-28 disks. So we went ahead with 14.

This aggregate can be expanded to 28 on the fly.

Now we would be creating Flex vols out of the aggregate. Here each vol would span 13 disks thus giving better performance. The Flex vols can be resized on the fly. Caution to be excercised is that for the volume to be resized it shd be arnd 20% free.

Netapp stood upto its name of a storage appliance, just 2 hrs to complete the upgrade. No wonder its got an order of 20 Petabytes.

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