NetApp SnapMirror Between 8.2 and 8.3 Gotcha!

Last week I attempt to create a snapmirror job between two NetApp running on different version and it was quite challenge to setup I decide to share them with everyone since they are quite difficult to troubleshoot them. Here are the two gotcha that you have to be aware and how to tackle them.


1. Unable to use GUI System Manager: The only way you are able to fully manage the Snapmirror will be via the CLI. The only action you will be to manage from the GUI are update, quiescence and abort, that's about it. The advantage, it get you more time on the CLI if you are like me that love the System Manager alot!

2. Language issue: Another gotcha I encounter was different language between SVMs. 8.3 does use different programing language than 8.2 which every volume will be set with the programming language set at the SVM level. So in order to make this work, I change the SVM programming language on my 8.3 to match the 8.2 SVM. So have you can do that? Here are the commands:

First, needs to show the vserver or vservers language:
GEEK::> vserver show -fields language
vserver  language
-------- --------
GEEKCIFS C
GEEKDR   en_US
GEEKESX  en_US
GEEKHyperV
         en_US
GEEKNAS  en_US
GEEKSAN  en
GEEKDemo  en_US
blatz    C
peacemaker
         C
9 entries were displayed.

You can see in the above example, some of them are C and some en_US.  

To modify the destination vserver language, use the following command:  

vserver modify -vserver <vservername> -language C

Note: You can’t change the language of an already created volume, so you’ll likely have to recreate the destination volume once you’ve changed the language (the volume inherits the SVM language).

I always recommend to run snapmirror on same ONTAP version for numerous reason such support, data consistency, performance and many other reason so try alway to keep your NetApp Enviroment up to date as much as possible. Hope this gotchas helps.