topic Re: Cluster Swap in StoreVirtual Storage

Cluster Swap

Paul Gazzara — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:14:35 GMT

Does anyone know where I can find documentation on doing a cluster swap? I have a new starter san coming in and would like to just swap the cluster to the new hardware.

Re: Cluster Swap

Patrick Terlisten — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:16:55 GMT

Hello,

what kind of harwdare do you currently use and what hardware will you receive?

Regards,
Patrick

Re: Cluster Swap

Paul Gazzara — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:19:21 GMT

I currently have an IBM 3650 1.8Tb running San/IQ 8.1 and a NSM 2060 1.8TB running San/IQ 8.1. We will be receiving a P4300 G2 7.2TB starter san. I assume it will have 8.5 on it.

Re: Cluster Swap

Patrick Terlisten — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:32:24 GMT

Hello Paul,

I'm not a LH crack, but remote snapshots would be a solution.

Regards,
Patrick

Re: Cluster Swap

Bryan McMullan — Mon, 10 May 2010 13:36:20 GMT

You could just add the new units to the cluster and allow everything to restripe. Then remove the old IBM from the management group and allow it to restripe again.

Beyond that, like Patrick said. Snapshot the volumes from the old cluster to the new one. Then get a maintenance window, do one final snapshot where there are no new changes, promote the volumes to primary, and finally change all your iSCSI initiators to point to the new cluster (and assign volume access within the cmc).

Re: Cluster Swap

Alaric Turner — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:32:26 GMT

If you are using this for only as an ESX target you could create a new parallel SAN & then storage Vmotion the machines accross

Re: Cluster Swap

Paul Gazzara — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:09:32 GMT

Thanks, however we do have some iSCSI connections from some servers along with ESX hosts.

Re: Cluster Swap

Mike Povall — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:22:11 GMT

The other option is to add the two new P4500 G2 units to the existing management group, create a new cluster within the existing management group with a new VIP and then edit the volume that you want to move changing the cluster entry to that of the new cluster.

SAN/iQ will then move the volume in the background while your servers remain attached to it. You will need to amend any iSCSI initiators so that they reference the new cluster going forward but the iSCSI connection will remain in operation following the move of the volume.

Once all of the volumes have been moved over then you can either reprovision the original storage as second tier or remove the cluster completely and decommission it.

Regards, Mike.

Re: Cluster Swap

Bryan McMullan — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:47:11 GMT

@Mike

We've had issues with that type of move with high transaction loads (like SQL Server volumes). So there may be a momentary drop when you move to the new cluster. (Enough of a drop to anger SQL.) While the same drop was there for fileshares and the such, they seem to be a lot more forgiving during the cluster migration.

Re: Cluster Swap

Paul Gazzara — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:12:20 GMT

Mike, Bryan that is exactly what I was after. Thanks for the info this and I think this will be the method I will use.

Re: Cluster Swap

Olvi_1 — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:31:23 GMT

How about Exchange Node feature? Any reasons why it should not be used for swapping nodes?

-Olvi

Re: Cluster Swap

djlaube — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:53:31 GMT

I've never had a problem doing cluster swap, even with SQL and Exchange.. if some of the posters have had problems with their SQL servers, I'd doublecheck that they have all of the correct (increased!) registry timeouts set for iSCSI and for networking.. this would alleviate any dropped databases.

The documentation for the cluster swap process just doesn't exist from what I've seen and I'd doubt that you'll find much, other than the doc entitled â P4000_adding node to clusterâ , which is close to the cluster swap process, but you will need exact instructions or be shown how to do a cluster swap to guarantee its success..

Re: Cluster Swap

bublik — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:06:09 GMT

Will this idea work if my existing SQL 2005 cluster is on 1G p4500 and I am moving this cluster to 10G P4500? If yes, what downtime am looking at?