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Rajagopal_V_
Not applicable
Employee

In the systems world, customers have use cases to migrate from AIX Operating System to Linux in their Enterprise or Mission Critical Data Center. The key challenge with such a migration is to move production data seamlessly with very minimal downtime.

How Symantec solution can help ?

Symantec Storage Foundation has implemented VXCONVERT and Portable Data Containers feature capabilities to seamlessly accomplish migration of data from IBM AIX systems to Linux (RHEL/SUSE) systems. VXCONVERT and Portable Data Containers are mature technologies helping customers for over a decade in the UNIX Enterprise world.

The Solution sequence to address the use-case:

VXCONVERT migrates the data stored on IBM AIX Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volume groups / Journaling File System (JFS2) to Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) disk groups / Veritas File System (VxFS).

Once the data is available in VxVM/VxFS format on an AIX system, deporting and importing it on a Linux environment is seamless using Symantec’s Portable Data Containers.

Estimating system down time: Best practices

There are many technical factors which determines the conversion time of VXCONVERT which is crucial information for planning application downtime in a production environment.

When customers want to convert their LVM/JFS2 configurations to VxVM/VxFS, the key questions asked are, “What are the key factors which contribute to the time taken by VXCONVERT” ? “Can we optimize the configuration for faster conversion ?”

Symantec has evaluated configurations of typical production environments where Storage Foundation has been deployed and studied the conversion times to come up with a set of best practices.

The aim of this article is to provide insights into the key attributes which consumes time and ways to optimize the conversion.

The factors mentioned below are assessed as part of the study.

·         The number of physical volumes in the LVM volume group.

·         The number of logical volumes in the LVM volume group.

·         The average size of a file in the JFS2 file system.

·         The size of the JFS2 file system.

·         The number of files in the JFS2 file system.

As an outcome of the study, the following factors have a significant impact on the conversion time and have proved to be useful references.

·         When the number of files in a file system size range is increased, conversion time increases.

·         Decreasing the number of files decreases conversion time.

·         Increasing the free space in the file system decreases conversion time.

·         Increasing the number of logical volumes impacts conversion time; however, the increase is marginal.

·         Increasing the number of disks in a volume group plays a significant role in increasing the conversion time.

Conclusion:

As part of the migration strategy, reducing the number of disks and increasing the free space in the AIX stack in general improves the conversion experience. 

 

Comments
Amit05
Not applicable
Employee

Good article Raj. 

Douglas_Snyder
Level 5
Employee Accredited Certified
Great article, the CDS feature is a terrific way to move data from one OS to another. For customers who can add disk to the systems they want to convert to VxFS there is an online method. Check the technote below for the online migration option. Once the migration to the new VxFS disks is complete customers can use CDS to move the data to Linux or another target OS. http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO59623
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Last update:
‎11-02-2012 02:21 PM
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