Open Replicator thick-to-thin migrations

Question

Good Day We are planning a massive migration effort and we are being told that with open replication, whether using hot pull or push, we need to shut the servers down when creating the OR sessions. Read through the documentation and found the following: 'For pull operations from devices with SCSI reservations, if the remote devices have a cluster running against them or the devices are AIX LVM devices, the cluster, AIX host, or other software that is creating the SCSI reservations must be shutdown before creating the Open Replicator session.' Does not list any of this restirction for hot push, but wanted to know the experience.

RRR · Answer

Doesn't sound familiar. So far I've created and ran sessions online, no problem there. The only downtime was when I had to rezone the host to connect it to the new array....

hermiecloete · Answer

That has been my experience as well. You also have AIX environment? Tried it with any HACMP clusters?

Booyah2 · Answer

One NEW Enginuity feature to also note:

With 5875 (latest Enginuity for VAMX) there is a migration tool called "Federated Live Migration or FLM).

This is a "No Down Time" migration tool using PowerPath or other supported Multipather.

Cut/Pasted from training material:

The new feature Federated Live Migration (FLM) migrates an application’s data without any application or application server down time. FLM uses Open Replicator for Symmetrix and PowerPath to accomplish this.

Booyah2 · Answer

FLM also supports Thick to Thin migrations.

hermiecloete · Answer

Thanks Booyah for the feedback. Did look into that, two problems though for us:

1.) FLM does not support boot from SAN, which we are.

2.) Requires Powerpath, 75% of our servers do not use PowerPath, just MPIO.

sauravrohilla · Answer

Also, FLM does not support Clustered volume migration. regards, Saurabh

Symmetrix

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