Move the CIFS servers to VDM on the source before doing the migration and save yourself some work

Agreed.  To elaborate, Rainer recommends moving the CIFS server on the physical DM to a VDM on the NS960, before migrating it.  By moving the CIFS servers to a VDM first, all you need to do is replicate that VDM to get the CIFS information.

On the NFS side, your exports point to the specific filesystems they're mounted on.  When you mount a filesystem on a VDM, the root becomes "/root_vdm_<#>/", so if VDM #1 has fs02 is mounted on it, the NFS export path is now starting at "/root_vdm_1/fs02".  This is probably the biggest gotcha you'll see.

Thanks Rainer and Karl.  Yeah I've done that in the past where I've moved the CIFS server to a VDM and then the associated file systems.  However, in this case where there is multiprotocol involved, I was thinking that by moving a files system that has NFS exports on it under a VDM will break it since that's only recently supported under DART 7.  Maybe I'm getting mixed up and it's not that way.

No – even before the latest code you could NFS export a VDM mounted file system.

You just couldn’t do it via the GUI and had to use a path from the physical DM like /root_vdm_x/fs

With the NFS VDM support the path changes to being relative to the VDM root like /fs

Also if its exported on the VDM the NFS share definition is kept in the VDM and replicated with it like for CIFS

Cool.  Thanks.  I will try to go that route.

How did the migration go eventually? I'm in the process of doing the exact same thing moving from NS20 to VNX5300.

So you didn't have any issues when moving to a VDM first at the source although NFS was used ?

Would these be the steps?

1.) move everything to a VDM on source

2.) replicate filesystems and VDM to target

3.) switchover filesystems

4.) switchover VDM

I'm still a bit unsure about what happens to my NFS exports when performing step 1

Moving a fs from the DM to a VDM will of course change the mountpoint and therefore the path in the export

I would would suggest to test with a test fs or simulator till you are comfortable before changing production file systems

As Rainer explained, the mount points will be different so you'll have to redo the exports. 

In my case, it worked perfectly and we we about to call it a success until I realized that there was one global share (a CIFS share presented through 3 servers) and so we had to back out.  I ended up migrating the hard way by doing sharedup/lgdup with a swing server.

Well, there are ways to make the export path the same on the dst but that requires more work and understanding

Unless the client change is too painful I would just change the client mount