A transfer of primary access copies data from a portion of a file system and relocates the access points for that data, or relocates an entire file system and its access points (copying the data and metadata), with very little down time, while the file system is live and servicing file read requests. For a short period, access is limited to read-only.
A transfer of primary access cannot move all attributes/relationships for a file system, but it can move most of them. For example:
- The following can be moved:
- SMB Shares (if within replicated path)
- NFS Exports (if within replicated path)
- FTP Initial Directories/Users (if within replicated path)
- Snapshot Rules (Moving snapshot rules requires their deletion and recreation. Deletion of snapshot rules automatically leads to the deletion of snapshots created with those rules)
- CNS Links
- The following cannot be moved:
- iSCSI Targets
- Global Symlinks
A transfer of primary access can be performed on any replication policy as long as the following conditions are met:
- A full replication has completed. Preferably an incremental replication should also have completed.
- The snapshot required to support another incremental replication must still be available.
Note: For any given replication policy, only one transfer of primary access operation may be in progress at any time.