The rule I usually use is this:
1)
Free space means all the space that is not used by actual data. For most customers, that means adding up free space in the aggregate, free space in
the volumes, and unused space in various LUNs and you have your total.
2)
Keep capacity at 85% or lower and you should have no worries.
3)
As you approach 90%, it’s time to start thinking about cleanup or getting more storage.
4)
You’ll probably start seeing slowdowns as approach 95%.
What you put inside doesn’t really matter. It could be LUNs, could be a ton of flexclones, and you might overprovision by 500% in theory. The provisioning is
just a matter of accounting. If you make a 1TB LUN you haven’t done anything other than reserve the right to 1TB worth of blocks on the aggregate. Until you actually write data and use those blocks, the aggregate doesn’t care about that reservation.
I presented at Insight and one of the recommendations I made was embracing thin provisioning across the board. Thin provision the LUNs, the clones, the volumes.
Everything, and then just pay attention to the reported free space on the aggregate. It’s just easier all around. A storage array is no longer a big box of disks they way it used to be. The best way to get value out of an array is to just think of it as one
giant data repository. Thinking of a LUN or a file as something tangible is an illusion.
From: toasters-bounces@teaparty.net [mailto:toasters-bounces@teaparty.net]
On Behalf Of Parisi, Justin
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 3:26 PM
To: Fred Grieco; Toasters
Subject: RE: Completely filling and aggregate
Yea, we don’t have that problem. Fill your aggr up? Cool. Shrink the volume. Turn off space guarantees. Delete volumes. Whatever.
J
Used to get the “I used up my space” call all the time when I was in support. Always had a (mostly) happy ending.
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Has anyone ever completely, completely (like with luns and overallocation) filled an aggregate? Were you able to reuse the aggregate again once you reduced the space (presumably by shrinking or deleting a volume or two)? Assume this
is not the root aggregate.
Putting aside how bad it is, how all the vols will fill and luns will go offline, how the performance will never be right, fragmentation, etc, this is recoverable, right?
I'm testing a competitor's product- known for thin provisioning- and it completely went off the rails after I did this accidentally. I mean... Delete everything, start over, and a big fat "don't do that then" from support.
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