Manual Volume Migration - HP StorageWorks P9000 User Manual

(page 11) for more information on requirements and restrictions when selecting source and target
volumes.

Manual volume migration

In a manual volume migration operation, the data on the source volume is copied to a reserved
target volume. Once all data is copied to the target volume, host access is transferred to the target
volume to complete the migration. During the migration, the source volume remains available for
read and write operations.
The volume migration copy operation copies the content of the source volume to the target volume
cylinder by cylinder (24 tracks at a time, not including the diagnostic and unassigned alternate
tracks). If the source volume is updated by write operations during the copy operation, the updates
will be recorded on the cylinder map of a volume. If differential data are created by the update,
the differential data are copied from the source volume to the target volume. This process is repeated
until all differential data on the source volume is copied. The following figure illustrates the data
flow during a manual migration operation.
Figure 1 Data Flow during an Auto LUN Operation
There is an upper limit to the number of times a copy operation is executed, and the limit depends
on the capacity of the source volume. The limit increases as the capacity of the source volume
increases. When differential data still exists after copy operations are repeated to the upper limit,
the migration fails. Before attempting the migration again, the workload between the host and the
storage system should be adequately reduced (especially write operations), preferably to a value
below 50 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
Once the volumes are fully synchronized (that is, there is no differential data on the source volume),
the P9500 storage system completes the migration by swapping the Reserve attribute (from target
volume to source volume) and redirecting host access to the target volume. The status of the target
volume becomes normal, and the status of the source volume becomes reserved. The following
figure illustrates the state of the volumes after a manual migration operation.
Figure 2 Data Flow after an Auto LUN Operation
Manual volume migration 7