Netapp Ontap 9 Volume Rehost

If you have been working with Netapp Clustered Data Ontap for a while now you would no doubt have performed quite a few volume moves. However one limitation of the volume move command was that you couldn’t move the volume between storage virtual machines (SVM’s)

Let’s Welcome the Volume Rehost Feature of Ontap 9

Starting with Ontap 9 we can now move a volume between Storage Virtual Machines (SVM’s). But… unlike the volume move command this is an offline command that requires the namespace or luns to be dismounted.

Let’s walk through an example.

Ontap 9 Volume Rehost

In this example I have 2 SVM’s, one called SVM3 and the other called SVM4. Within SVM3 I have a volume called NFS2, this volume I will be moving or in ontap terms, rehosting to SVM4.

Before we begin if this volume is in use either by virtual machines, cifs shares, lun attachement, etc you will want to shutdown and disconnect all sessions as we will be unmounting the namespace. If we have a lun within this volume, the lun will be unmapped from the initiator.

You can see the list of volumes I have in both SVM’s from the screen shot below:

MY NFS2 volume is mounted within the SVM namespace with the junction path /NFS2. Next we will dismount it with the command volume unmount

We are now ready to run the volume rehost command. The command is quite simple to run using the options of source vserver, destination vserver and the volume we would like to rehost.

Now that the volume has been move to our destination SVM successfully we can see it appear in the list of volumes with the show volume command. The volume does not get automatically mounted within the namespace on the destination SVM, so to mount it we can simply use the volume mount command as seen in the example screen shot below. Once the volume has been mounted you can verify the junction-path with the volume show command and displaying the field junction-path.