Data migration from FC-60 to EVA

[Keith C. Patterson]

Hello all,
Hope this group covers the topic as this is a host based migration also.
Anyway, I am familiar with data migrations and have done many of them mostly on HDS storage using HDS tools.
However, in this scenario I need to migrate data from the above mentioned storage as well as from and older FC-AL only server, single HBA to a new fabric aware server with dual paths.
I was considering attaching the FC-60 down one path of the new server, FC-AL of course and attaching to the EVA down the other path, fabric of course. Will I have success in doing this using a combination of the VG commands along with pvmove?
If not can anyone suggest a better alternative?
Thanks for any advice.

[Mel Burslan]

vxdump would be my choice of command to use. We have done the same exact thing you mentioned, i.e., connect old array (EMC) to one HBA and connect new array (XP1024) to the other, then do copied the data using vxdump. Both interfaces and everything on their way to the array were 2GB speed and we have experienced close to quadruple performance with vxdump compared to pvmove.

If you happen to search the responses posted by Bill Hasell, you can find his explanation of why pvmove is so slow. It basicaly, verifies the moev performed, to oblivion, to mae sure of the data consistency. It is a good choice for doing this activity on the live systems, but since you are migrating, I am under the impression that you have some down time scheduled and why not make use of it and make it faster.

Hope this helps

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

We did something similar on a sun, we called sun and asked for a special cable to connect the old fcal (A5200) disks to the new HBA (Qlogic). We then used veritas to mirror from old to new. If you are using lvm you could do the same (that is if your volumegroups max_physical_vols and physical_extent_size are not the limit). Otherwise vxdump is very fast.

Hope this helps a bit.

Robert-Jan

[Julio Yamawaki]

Hi,

I made a data migration like yours, but using an old storage with SCSI FWD and a new one attached in the same server with FC-AL.
To move data we used MirrorDisk/UX, for a 300 GB wich lasted for about 4 hours (FWD is slow...).
After mirroring old data to new storage, we reduced the mirror to 0 again, but reducind old storage.
In this case, we had no interruption of work.
We stopped at the end of mirroring only to reconfigure MC/Serviceguard.

Regards,