NetApp LSA Move

Fyi, we discussed the October infrastructure day and the NetApp LSA move during the Enterprise Infrastructure LT meeting yesterday. It also came up during the monthly data centers conference call this morning.

Rex asked Pete and I to meet with the ITS LT on Tuesday afternoon to talk about the LSA move (Pete has been responsible for scheduling and communication for the infrastructure day). I expect that group to consider a few questions: can we tolerate the downtime now during the fall session; can we defer the move until January, when we're between fall and spring; is it worth the staff time to do the move more gradually?

I'm planning to schedule something for Tuesday morning so I'm prepped before the meeting with the LT that afternoon. I'll include a few questions in the appointment.

Meeting is at 10 AM on Sep. 7.

Q: Could we make the work transparent to VMware by using VMotion to move VMs between JH and LC?

A:

Not between the filers – we wouldn’t have enough space and would lose all the dedup savings and it would really mess up the snapshots. We could possibly do it from the itsnas01b to the lc-cx4 (if we had the space there) but again, we would really mess up the snapshots on the JHVM volumes. There would be issues around the fact that the windows vm’s no longer have BESR installed and so they wouldn’t have full vm recovery for however long they were off the NAS.

Q: How much time would that take (both in terms of effort, and in calendar time)?

A: a lot: new zoning, mounting new datastores on the clusters, formatting, storage vmotions – they would probably need to limit them to 2 to 4 at a time and let’s say they take an hour so that would be 63 hours at 4 at a time or 125 hours at 2 at a time (I just checked my sent mail – there was a problem with cpu spikes when they moved more than 2 at a time to the NAS – we may end up with the same problem moving them off)

Q: Any progress on the routing questions for the scenario where we move services between vifs? Is there a way to change the routing (and default gateway) without disrupting services? (Would we be confident enough to make that change live?)

A: I have a question in to netapp about the default route (sent yesterday). I’ve read a few conflicting support articles – one said you needed to bring the interfaces down in order to change the default route. Another I read said that routed probably wasn’t even needed anymore and could be turned off because of fast path. I’m still researching.