upgrading saniq nsm2120 with version 7 software to version 10

[Joe_231]

 I have a legacy 2 node lefthand nsm san in place running the volumes for our production servers. I've added a new HP p4300 g2 2 node san. I'd like to upgrade the software on the old san that is currently running version 7 of saniq to the current version 10 so that I can move the existing volumes onto the new san without doing backup\restore on all of our servers.

here are my questions:

 Can I upgrade nsm2120 modules to run saniq v 10?

 During the software upgrade process will my volumes be up?

at the end of the software upgrade process, will all of my existing volumes and their data still be intact?

once the software in my 2 sans (old and new) are aligned, can I migrate volumes across the management groups?

anything I should be concerned about?

I do plan to have full backups prepared just in case.

[rupak_d]

nsm2120 can't be upgraded to v10.

Only G2 and newer models can be upgarde to v10. 

9.5 is the latest supported version for 2120. 

Verify the latest compatibility matrix from: 

hp.com/go/P4000compatibility

[Joe_231]

ok then,

 I guess my questions then become:

When upgrading my nsm to 9.5 will my volumes be up during the process?

at the end of the software upgrade process, will all of my existing volumes and their data still be intact?

once the software on the nsm is at level 9.5, will that allow a single console to view both?

Will I be able to migrate volumes across the management groups?

[oikjn]

as long as your managers are setup correctly and you don't have any quorum warnings AND your volumes are setup w/ network redundancy (IE, no NR0), you should be able to upgrade as high as you can live without taking the LUNs offline.

Migration from one management group to another isn't as simple as cluster migration.  Only option I could think of is either reading up on remote snapshots and failover on those or see if you can downgrade your higher level nodes and join them to the 9.5 group and then do a node swap to move over your data and then remove the old nodes and make a new management group for them.

You shouldn't lose any data, but if you are thinking in the future you will be able to migrate LUNs from one group to the other without downtime, you are out of luck as that can only happen within a cluster and that would mean that you would have to keep your new nodes at v9.5 which IMO isn't worth it.

[Joe_231]

thanks oikjn, I believe that answers my overall question which is what's the best\easiest ways to migrate my servers from the old san to the new san.  I will just back up the servers and restore them onto the new san. it's less work and there's no worries from that that I'll get stuck or lose anything.

 The old san is going to become second tier storage so once the migration is done there's not going to be back and forth movement between them (though it would have been nice to have that flexibility)

thanks again, I have my plan.

[oikjn]

I would highly suggest you read up on remote snapshot DR failover in the HP guides.  unless you have an ungodly number of LUNs, it would probably be faster and easier to do a migration where you shapshot over the luns and then do a planned failover to the new management group.  Using that method, you should be able to stage the data and do a LUN at a time migration with just some brief downtime as opposed to the time it would take to do a backup/restore.  That is defintely going to be faster than any backup/restore procedure and really isn't THAT difficult to do once or twice... it just isn't a good idea to think of it as an option for moving LUNs back and forth on a regular basis.

[Joe_231]

ok, so for the management group remote snapshot will upgrading the old san to 9.5 be sufficient for them to interact, or would I have to downgrade the new san running 10.0?

[oikjn]

fair point.  I'm not 100% sure on that.  I thought I read somewhere that you can go 9.5 to 10.5, but I"m not sure there.  CMC will either let you or it won't, so I would say just setup the v10 group and see if it lets you make a rempote snapshot.  Manuals are at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&lang=en&cc=us&docIndexId=64179&taskId=101&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=4118659 

I would try the making the remote snapshot association right after setting up the v10 management group.  If that doesn't work, I would consider downgrading the nodes to v9.5, but at that point you can then do a node swap and do a totally seamless transition to the new nodes after which you can remove the old nodes from the management group, create a new management group w/ those nodes and then upgrade the new nodes back up to current version.  The good news is that upgrading nodes is easy and can be done live from v9.5 to v10.5, but downgrading is a bit too much for a lot of people so you might not like that option.