Before upgrading to ONTAP 9.12.1, you must convert existing DP-type relationships to XDP before you can upgrade to ONTAP 9.12.1 and later releases. For more information, see Convert an existing DP-type relationship to XDP.

SnapMirror invoked in DP mode and SnapMirror invoked in XDP mode used different replication engines, with different approaches to version-dependence:

With improvements in performance, the significant benefits of version-flexible SnapMirror outweigh the slight advantage in replication throughput obtained with version-dependent mode. For this reason XDP mode has been made the new default, and any invocations of DP mode on the command line or in new or existing scripts are automatically converted to XDP mode.

Existing relationships are not affected. If a relationship is already of type DP, it will continue to be of type DP. MirrorAndVault is the new default policy when no data protection mode is specified or when XDP mode is specified as the relationship type. The table below shows the behavior you can expect.

As the table shows, the default policies assigned to XDP in different circumstances ensure that the conversion maintains the functional equivalence of the old types. Of course, you can use different policies as needed, including policies for unified replication:

The only exceptions to conversion are as follows: