Creating a mirror relationship from a source volume

You can create a mirror relationship between a source volume and a destination volume from the source volume, and assign a mirror policy and schedule to the mirror relationship. The mirror copy enables quick availability and restoration of data if the data on the source volume is corrupted or lost.

Before you begin

•	The SnapMirror license must be enabled on both the source and the destination storage systems or the nodes that contain the source and destination volumes.

•	The source and destination clusters must be added to System Manager.

If you have added the destination cluster after you have opened the source cluster management window, you must close the management window and log in to the source cluster again to view the destination cluster.

•	If you have renamed a cluster after adding it to System Manager, you must have deleted it and added it again.

Otherwise, you cannot create a mirror relationship in System Manager.

•	The clusters must not have the same name.

•	If the source and destination clusters are in a peer relationship, the relationship state must be healthy.

Peer relationships might be in an unhealthy state due to various reasons—for example, intercluster LIFs between the clusters are down. In such cases, you might be able to successfully create vault relationships, but subsequent operations, such as initialization might fail.

•	The destination aggregate must have available space.

•	The source volume of type read-write (rw) must exist.

•	An empty destination volume of type dp must exist.

•	The destination volume must not be the destination for any other mirror relationship.

•	The capacity of the destination volume must be greater than or equal to the capacity of the source volume.

•	If autogrow is disabled, the free space on the destination volume must be at least five percent more than the used space on the source volume.

About this task

System Manager does not support a cascade relationship. For example, a destination volume in a relationship cannot be the source volume in another relationship.

Steps

1.	From the home page, double-click the appropriate storage system.

2.	Expand the Storage Virtual Machines hierarchy in the left navigation pane.

3.	In the navigation pane, select the Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) and click Storage > Volumes.

4.	Select the volume for which you want to create a mirror relationship, and click Protect by > Mirror.

The Protect by option is available only for a read/write volume.

5.	In the Create Mirror Relationship window, specify the cluster and the SVM that contains the destination volume.

If System Manager is unable to retrieve the credentials of the specified cluster, you can use the Authenticate link to enter and save the credentials.

6.	If the source and destination clusters are not in a peer relationship, use the Create Peer link to create a peer relationship between the destination cluster and the source cluster.

7.	Create a new destination volume or select an existing volume:

If you want to...	Do the following...
Create a new volume	If you want to change the default name, displayed in the format source_SVM_name_source_volume_name_data protection, specify a new name and select the containing aggregate for the destination volume.
Select an existing volume	Select the Select Volume option. Note: Only those volumes with the same language attribute as the source volume are listed.

8.	Select an existing policy or create a new policy:

If you want to...	Do the following...
Select an existing policy	Select a mirror policy from the list.
Create a new policy	Click Create Policy, and then specify a policy name, set schedule transfer priority, and click Create. Low indicates that the transfer has the least priority and is usually scheduled after normal priority transfers. By default, the priority is set to normal.

9.	Specify a schedule for the relationship:

If...

Do the following...

You want to assign an existing schedule

From the list of schedules, select an existing schedule.

You want to create a new schedule

a.	Click Create Schedule.

b.	Specify a name for the schedule.

c.	Select either Basic or Advanced.

•	Basic: You can select this option to specify only the day of the week, time, and the transfer interval.

•	Advanced: You can select this option to specify a cron style schedule.

d.	Click Create.

You do not want to assign a schedule

Select None.

10.	Select Start Baseline Transfer Now to initialize the mirror relationship.

11.	Click Create.

Result

A new destination volume of type dp is created with the following default settings:

•	Autogrow is enabled

•	Compression is disabled

•	Language attribute is set to match the language attribute of the source volume

If the destination volume is on a different SVM than the source, then a peer relationship is created between the two SVMs if the relationship did not already exist.

A mirror relationship is created between the source volume and the destination volume. The base Snapshot copy is transferred to the destination volume if you have opted to initialize the relationship.

Related reference

Protection window