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Disable long-term retention snapshots before ONTAP upgrade

Contributors netapp-dbagwell
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If you are upgrading from ONTAP 9.9.1 or earlier to ONTAP 9.10.1 or later and you have a SnapMirror cascade relationship configured on your cluster, you should disable long-term retention (LTR) snapshots from middle volumes in the cascade before you upgrade. Cascading a volume with LTR snapshots enabled is not supported in ONTAP 9.10.1 or later. Using this configuration after upgrading could result in missed backups and snapshots.

You need to take action in the following scenarios:

  • Long-Term Retention (LTR) snapshots are configured on the "B" volume in an "A > B > C" SnapMirror cascade or on another middle SnapMirror destination volume in your larger cascade.

  • LTR snapshots are defined by a schedule applied to a SnapMirror policy rule. This rule does not replicate snapshots from the source volume but creates them directly on the destination volume.

    Note For more information on schedules and SnapMirror policies, see the Knowledge Base article How does the "schedule" parameter in an ONTAP 9 SnapMirror policy rule work?.
Steps

  1. Remove the LTR rule from the SnapMirror policy on the middle volume of the cascade:

    Secondary::> snapmirror policy remove-rule -vserver <> -policy <> -snapmirror-label <>

  2. Add the rule again for the SnapMirror label without the LTR schedule:

    Secondary::> snapmirror policy add-rule -vserver <> -policy <> -snapmirror-label <> -keep <>
    Note Removing LTR snapshots from the SnapMirror policy rules means SnapMirror will pull the snapshots with the given label from the source volume. You might also need to add or modify a schedule on the source volume's snapshot policy to create properly labeled snapshots.

  3. If necessary, modify (or create) a schedule on the source volume snapshot policy to allow snapshots to be created with a SnapMirror label:

    Primary::> volume snapshot policy modify-schedule -vserver <> -policy <> -schedule <> -snapmirror-label <>
    Primary::> volume snapshot policy add-schedule -vserver <> -policy <> -schedule <> -snapmirror-label <> -count <>
Note LTR snapshots can still be enabled on the final SnapMirror destination volume within a SnapMirror cascade configuration.