Stop and start replication on a fileset

The stop and start operations can be used during the downtime planning of the replication activities on an AFM or AFM-DR fileset. When you stop the replication on an AFM fileset, the fileset state changes to 'Stopped' and the replication between both sites stops until you perform the 'start' operation on the stopped fileset. These operations are useful to control the replication during the downtime and manage the bandwidth efficiently.

When the fileset state is 'Stopped', any data modification at the cache or the home is not synchronized. That is, the changed data at the cache does not reflect in filesets at the home, and the home data is not available at the configured cache.

After the downtime, you need to perform the 'start' operation to start the replication activities on the fileset. The start operation first triggers the 'recovery' phase on the fileset, which determines the local changes and prepares the changed list for the replication. This list is sent to the assigned gateway node to synchronize the data with the home.

During the recovery phase, all pending operations are synchronized by using the Priority Queue on the gateway node. AFM or AFM-DR replicates a full file again if the file has any changes during the recovery phase because AFM does not track changed data at the file level. After the recovery phase is complete and all changes are synchronized to the home, the AFM fileset state changes to 'Active'.

If AFM-DR primary fileset is not synchronized to the secondary fileset and the primary fileset is in 'PrimInitInProg' during the maintenance, AFM queues all files again and synchronizes the queued files to the AFM-DR secondary. When the primary is synchronized with the secondary and 'psnap0' is created at both sites, AFM changes the primary fileset state and leaves the 'PrimInitInProg' state.

To stop replication of an AFM fileset, issue the following command:

#mmafmctl <fs> stop -j <fileset>

You can check the fileset state by using the following command:

#mmafmctl <fs> getstate -j <fileset>

System displays a similar output as follows:

Fileset Name Fileset Target                      Cache State   Gateway Node  Queue Length  Queue numExec
------------ --------------                      ------------- ------------  ------------  -------------
afmFileset   nfs://p7fbn09/gpfs/fs0/swfileset3   Stopped

The state of the fileset is now 'Stopped'.

To start replication on a specific fileset, issue the following command:

#mmafmctl <fs> start -j <fileset>

If you perform other operations like stop or flushpending on a fileset that is in the 'Stopped' state, the system displays an error message as follows:

Operation not permitted
mmafmctl: [E] Operation is not permitted as state of the fileset is Stopped.
mmafmctl: Command failed. Examine previous error messages to determine cause.

A similar message like this error message is displayed, when you perform the start operation on a fileset that is not in the 'Stopped' state.