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Prerequisites

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When planning your SnapMirror Business Continuity deployment, ensure you have met the various hardware, software, and system configuration requirements.

Hardware

  • Only two-node HA clusters are supported

  • Both clusters must be either AFF (including AFF C-Series) or ASA (no mixing)

Software

  • ONTAP 9.8 or later

  • ONTAP Mediator 1.2 or later

  • A Linux server or virtual machine for the ONTAP Mediator running one of the following:

ONTAP Mediator version

Supported Linux versions

1.7

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3

  • Rocky Linux 8 and 9

1.6

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2

  • Rocky Linux 8 and 9

1.5

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5

  • CentOS: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9

1.4

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5

  • CentOS: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9

1.3

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3

  • CentOS: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9

1.2

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 8.1

  • CentOS: 7.6, 7.7, 7.8

Licensing

  • SnapMirror synchronous (SM-S) license must be applied on both clusters

  • SnapMirror license must be applied on both clusters

    Note If your ONTAP storage systems were purchased before June 2019, see NetApp ONTAP Master License Keys to get the required SM-S license.

The SnapMirror synchronous and SnapMirror license are included in ONTAP One.

Networking environment

  • Inter-cluster latency round trip time (RTT) must be less than 10 milliseconds.

  • SCSI-3 persistent reservations are not supported with SM-BC .

Supported protocols

  • Only SAN protocols are supported (not NFS/SMB).

  • Only Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols are supported.

  • The default IPspace is required by SM-BC for cluster peer relationships. Custom IPspace is not supported.

NTFS Security Style

NTFS security style is not supported on SM-BC volumes.

ONTAP Mediator

  • The ONTAP Mediator be provisioned externally and attached to ONTAP for transparent application failover.

  • To be fully functional and to enable automatic unplanned failover, the external ONTAP mediator should be provisioned and configured with ONTAP clusters.

  • The ONTAP Mediator must be installed in a third failure domain, separate from the two ONTAP clusters.

  • When installing the ONTAP Mediator, you should replace the self-signed certificate with a valid certificate signed by a mainstream reliable CA.

  • For more information about the ONTAP Mediator, see Prepare to install the ONTAP Mediator service.

Read-write destination volumes

  • SM-BC relationships are not supported on read-write destination volumes. Before you can use a read-write volume, you must convert it to a DP volume by creating a volume-level SnapMirror relationship and then deleting the relationship. For details, see Converting existing relationships to SM-BC relationships

Large LUNs and large volumes

Support for large LUNs and large volumes (greater than 100 TB) depends on the version of ONTAP you are using and your platform.

ONTAP 9.12.1P2 and later

  • For ONTAP 9.12.1 P2 and later, SMBC supports Large LUNs and large volumes greater than 100TB on ASA and AFF (including C-Series).

Note For ONTAP Releases 9.12.1P2 and later, You must ensure that both the primary and secondary clusters are either All-Flash SAN Arrays or All Flash Array, and that they both have ONTAP 9.12.1 P2 or later installed. If the secondary cluster is running a version earlier than ONTAP 9.12.1P2 or if the array type is not the same as primary cluster, the synchronous relationship can go out of sync if the primary volume grows larger than 100 TB.
ONTAP 9.8 - 9.12.1P1

  • For ONTAP releases between ONTAP 9.8 and 9.12.1 P1 (inclusive), Large LUNs and large volumes greater than 100TB are supported only on All-Flash SAN Arrays.

Note For ONTAP releases between ONTAP 9.8 and 9.12.1 P2, You must ensure that both the primary and secondary clusters are All-Flash SAN Arrays, and that they both have ONTAP 9.8 or later installed. If the secondary cluster is running a version earlier than ONTAP 9.8 or if it is not an All-Flash SAN Array, the synchronous relationship can go out of sync if the primary volume grows larger than 100 TB.

Further information