Migration Weekend: Success

It was a long weekend of watching tape restores and restarting them as necessary but it’s finally over and everything appears to be mostly hunky dory!

I did discovery yet more small misconfigurations and strange behaviour along the way:

  1. OpenLDAP’s syncrepl using “refereshAndPersist” wasn’t working how I expected it to, no new changes were replicating to the slave LDAP server! I changed the directive to “refreshOnly” and set a 10 minute interval. I made several changes and monitored the slave LDAP server. Changes propagated in about 10 minutes, every time.
  2. Despite iSCSI’s maturity and the maturity of QLogic’s HBAs I still noticed strange, unexplained target drop outs. Two HBAs per server, two controllers in the IBM DS3300 and just one target out of four was dropping. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to properly reconnect the target on a live system so I rebooted. Later, I discovered you can “disable” and then “enable” the specific target in SANsurfer or iscli, which worked to bring back the dropped target on a live system. Multipath picked up the “new” path right away, as expected.
  3. Always remember to leave free physical extents in any LVM Volume Group in which you are taking snapshots of the Logical Volumes. It’s freakin’ obvious but I forgot and when I went to do snapshot backups, the snapshots were failing. Now I’m growing some LUNs on the DS3300 so that my VGs have room for snapshots.

All in all, a good weekend that was mostly filled with success.

Migration Weekend

The big data migration is upon me!

This weekend we will be migrating about 3TB of data from aging 5 year old servers with internal DAS RAID over to the new infrastructure I’ve been building over the last two months. Part of my genius plan is to migrate the data using our backup & restore software. The genius I believe comes from the fact that doing the migration via tape restore will provide a long overdue full test of our capability to restore in the event of catastrophic storage failure. Data migration and restore testing, two birds with one stone.

Wish me luck!