Migrating CIFS Shares to a new NetApp Filer

What better way to kick off the festive season than a with a storage migration (only being slightly ironic!).  A customer uses their existing NetApp kit to provide block storage to vSphere hosts and CIFS shares to Windows clients and they wanted me to do a swap out upgrade.  Migrating the vSphere data is a cinch nowadays, what with Storage vMotion and all, so I’ll just document the CIFS stuff.

1. First you’ll need to setup a SnapMirror relationship of the CIFS volume between the source and destination filers (no faffing around with robocopy and the like)
2. Make a backup copy of the /etc/cifsconfig_shares.cfg file
3. Execute cifs terminate on the source filer (downtime starts here)
4. Update (quiesce if necessary) and break the SnapMirror relationship
5. Take the source filer offline
6. Assign the source filer’s IP to the new filer
7. Reset the source filer’s account in Active Directory (if applicable)
8. Execute cifs setup on the new filer
1. It goes without saying that you will assign the source filer’s hostname to the destination filer, as well as join it to the AD (assuming the source filer was joined)
9. Execute cifs terminate on the destination filer and replace the cifsconfig_shares.cfg with the backup copy you made in step 2
10. Execute cifs restart on the destination filer
11. Test client access