The ability to quickly move data between different locations between on-premises and cloud is one of the important requirements especially when dealing with critical data. The more important is the data, higher the pressure. This requirement doesn’t change for “local” storage either where expectations are even higher. NetApp ONTAP Disk move and replace options by using command line is a great feature to address situations where data is growing outside the expected thresholds. It can simply move data into a new disk or storage. Similar considerations are valid for hardware failures. What if disks that are part of a RAID start to show signs of malfunctions? These are only a few cases where managing data across different hardware storage and tiers is beneficial for long term retention and compliance.
When running a NetApp ONTAP Disk move and replace all the operations can be done just by leveraging the command line. In this case even it couldn’t be any easier considering the NetApp ONTAP simulator is used an example.. In fact although the Disks are emulated it offers a good understanding of the main operations and how to get familiar with the NetApp ONTAP solution.
For the purpose of this exercise the article goes through different steps like connecting to the storage appliance using SSH, list the current disks and owners, changing the Owner default policy and finally run the commands to copy the data content to other disks before removing the existing ones.
NetApp ONTAP Disk move and replace
To start with the NetApp ONTAP disk move first step is to connect to the storage appliance using a SSH connection. Putty utility is probably the easiest to use. If the connection is successful it will show the certificate key fingerprint which will be automatically stored for next connections. Credentials are the same provided for accessing the web GUI of OnCommand System Manager.
A simple Disk show command will display all the mounted disks along with other useful info like Size, Disk Type, Container, Pool and Owner.
Next step is to verify the active auto assign policy for the new disks:
“storage disk option show”
shows the Node owner and the current policy with the Auto Assign set to on.
In order to disable the default policy is sufficient to enter:
“storage disk option modify -autoassign off”
This will update now to the current value for the the auto assign method.
According to the available disks (or the emulated ones for this NetApp ONTAP Simulator) it is now possible to copy the data from one disk to another before the replacement takes place. In this case data is copied from Disk 15 on the second disk shelf (0-1-2-3) to the disk in the first bay on the same shelf.
During the copy command operation is possible to take a look at the OnCommand System Manager in the Storage > Aggregate & Disks section > Aggregates > Volumes > Disks > Disk Information. It shows the copy progress from the old disk to the new one.
As soon as the operation is completed the old disk (1.15 in this case) is automatically unmounted.
This particular Aggregate consists of 2 disks. Assuming the goal is to keep all disks for the same aggregate contiguous it is just a matter to rerun the same command for the new disk couple (old and new). In this case moving data from disk 1.36 to 1.2.
The OnCommand System Manager interface shows the action in real time.
As a result the data for this particular aggregate and volume is contiguous on the desired disks.
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