forgive me if these questions are too basic, but I need to clarify them first before start using our F760 OnTAP 5.3.5R2. I'm in the learning process and I just couldn't find any faq on the net.
true or false ?
I'll do my best :)
we cannot reduce size of a volume or reduce number of disk once allocated to a volume.
True.
we connot take a volume offline (from online state) without rebooting.
True; this is not currently supported. This will change in a future release.
we cannot create a volume in that it will become offline when created.
Not as far as I'm aware. Once the point above is resolved, I suspect this wouldn't be as much as issue for you.
we have to destroy entire volume to delete qtree.
False; just delete the directory (after removing any NFS & CIFS shares that refer to it)
we cannot set maxfiles value for qtree. We have to set by volume. (I'm worrying about the news spool where we used to have a 512 bytes/inode on our UFS. How does everyone set their news spool, create a qtree for news spool or a separate volume ?)
You can use qtree quotas to limit the # of files in a qtree (the last field; refer to quotas(5) for more info).
The benefits of using a separate volume for news is that you probably want a different snapshot regime for news than general purpose data, and you'd also probably set the minra and no_atime volume options (which you can't adjust per qtree)
I don't understand below statement in System Administration Guide pg 72-73 : what does it mean by "The maximum RAID group size is 52 disks." when "The largest RAID group size you can create manually is 28 disks."
I believe certain older systems & releases *may* have supported up to 52 disks but I'm not 100% certain. I definitely know it was at least 28 disks on the F330. The default is now 14 disks per raid group, and you can tweak this up to 28 disks per raid group but this isn't recommended due to the increase change of data loss due to the exposure to a double disk failure. There's a white paper on the NetApp web site tech library about this: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3027.html
Hope that helps, Luke.
-- Luke Mewburn lukem@netapp.com Systems Engineer, Network Appliance Melbourne, Australia Phone: +61 419 361 266, Fax: +61 3 9866 1011