Dell Unity™ Family VNX® Series Data Import to Unity All Flash or Hybrid, or UnityVSA™ System User Guide

About import

The Import feature allows you to migrate a VDM, or a LUN or a consistency group (CG) of LUNs, with its configuration and data from an existing source VNX storage system to a target Unity storage system. This feature provides a built-in capability for NFS-only VDM imports with minimal or no disruption to clients. It also provides a built-in capability for CIFS-only VDM and block-based imports. However, cutting over of a CIFS-only VDM or a block import session can be a disruptive process. Finally, this feature enables you to perform multiprotocol migrations from VNX source storage to destination Unity systems.

For a block-based import, after the cutover completes, host I/O operations are switched to the target system and the import process completes automatically. For a file-based virtual data mover (VDM) import, after cutover completes, the import process does an incremental copy automatically but you must complete the import manually.

An import is always conducted from the Unity storage system. The target system makes a remote call to the VNX storage system and instigates a pull (for file-based import) or push (for block-based import) of the source storage resources to the target system.