Network Appliance NAS Device Procedures That Do Not Require Cluster Preparation

The following Network Appliance clustered-filer procedures can be performed without affecting the filer's availability.

• Monitoring the status of the cluster as a whole

• Viewing information about the cluster

• Enabling and disabling takeover on a cluster to perform software upgrades or other maintenance

• Halting a filer in a cluster without causing a takeover

• Performing a takeover on the partner filer

• Performing license operations on the cluster feature

• Enabling and disabling the negotiated failover feature on a cluster

When performing any maintenance procedure other than those listed, perform the steps in How to Prepare the Cluster for Network Appliance NAS Device Maintenance before the maintenance procedure. Perform the steps in How to Restore Cluster Configuration After Network Appliance NAS Device Maintenance after performing the maintenance procedure.

If you fail to prepare the cluster, you can experience loss of cluster availability. If the cluster loses access to the NAS device's directories, your cluster applications will experience I/O errors, might not be able to fail over correctly, and might fail. If your cluster experiences this kind of failure, you must reboot the entire cluster (booting NAS device before the cluster nodes). If your cluster loses access to a NAS quorum device, and then a node fails, the entire cluster can become unavailable. In this case, you must either reboot the entire cluster (booting NAS device before the cluster nodes) or remove the quorum device and configure it again.