How to perform an online move of a NetApp volume

NetApp has the ability to move a volume online, between a set of disks or aggregates on the same controller.

Unfortunately, "online" to NetApp has two different meanings.

• For NAS volumes (NFS/CIFS), the volume can be "online" but cannot be exported or shared...therefore, it cannot be serving data.

• For block storage (FC/iSCSI), the volume can be online AND serving data - therefore, no downtime!

Requirements:

• 1. SSH/CLI access
• 2. Data ONTAP 7-Mode, version 8.x or higher

To perform the move, do the following:

vol move start <VOLNAME> <DESTINATION-AGGREGATE>

The move operation will be started immediately.  If you have NFS exports or CIFS shares on this volume, you will receive an error message and the move operation will not proceed.  You must first remove the NFS exports or CIFS shares and retry the move operation.

To monitor the progress, you have the choice of two commands.  

vol move status

or

snapmirror status

Snapmirror status will give you more information - showing you the progress/how much data has been transferred, but will also show other snapmirror sessions.

If the move has been taking a while, and you check the status using the two commands above - you may see that the operation is paused.  This can happen if you have a busy filer, or it was busy during it's attempted cutover.

"vol move status" will show "paused"

"snapmirror status" will show "idle"

If that is the case, you can resume/retry the move:

vol move resume

Once the move is complete (the output of "vol move status" will be blank) - and you can see the volume on the new aggregate, you'll want to go and clean up the temporary snapshot used to do the transfer.

snap list <VOLNAME>

look for the snapshot that contains "ndm_dstvol"

snap delete <VOLNAME> <ndm_dstvol_SNAPNAME>

The volume move is complete!

If you had to remove your NFS export or CIFS share, you can go and re-add it now.