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Need some help setting up mirror/replication

 
Biochrome
New Member

Need some help setting up mirror/replication

All,

 

I'm trying to figure out something that (I think, at least) should be relatively simple.

 

We've got four "old" low-capacity SANs (about 3.5 TB each) in a cluster/site together, and a fith "new" one (22 TB). All are fully patched (LHOS/SANiQ 10.5).

 

I'm trying to find a way to mirror/replicate/clone all of the volumes from the old one to the new one, and I can't figure it out.

 

I tried snapshots/remote snapshots, but it's saying I have no space -- which i don't on the old ones, but that's silly, since I'm trying to snapshot ONTO the new one that's empty.

 

From what I've read, I don't think a "Smart Clone" is what I want to do.

 

I tried adding the new system to a new site, and bring it into the cluster, but then it complains that there won't be the same number of systems in each site (which makes no sense/why should it care?)

 

If I go to add it to the already existing site/cluster, it says things about restriping the RAIDs, etc, and (if I'm not mistaken), this means it's going to be just expanding the current volumes onto it (not what I want!!)

 

...any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

tl;dr--I need a way to copy my existing volumes onto this new device and keep them up-to-date (daily snap mirrors, or something like that), and I can't figure it out.

 

1 REPLY 1
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Need some help setting up mirror/replication

are your volumes thin provisioned?  Make sure they are.  In order to do remote snapshots, the system has to make a local snapshot and then it replicates it to the remote site.  It then has to maintain at least one local snapshot in order to stay in sync with the remote site.  The problem is that if you are full provisioned, the shapshots are also full which eats up a TON of space so just switch the volumes to thin provisioning and then it will probably work unless you really are at 98+% full.

 

The alternative is not to snapshot, but to join the new san to the old management group and then do a volume migration from the old cluster to the new cluster and then if you want to split them out into seporate management groups later you can do that, but it would require having the old nodes completely empty.