William> Starting to look ahead to the upcoming OnTap 7. I'm very William> excited about the new aggregates and flexvols. What criteria William> should one use in determining the number of aggregates to William> create? For example, FAS960 with 6ea DS14Mk2 shelves filled William> with 144GB FC drives. Would it be better to create one huge William> aggregate or several smaller aggregates? From my William> perspective, I see no practical use for Tradional volumes William> after upgrading to OnTap 7 and would like to convert to William> flexvols, but was wondering if anyone with any experience William> with any of the OnTap 7 RC's could provide feedback on this.
From my reading of the documents on the NetApp web site, it looks like you'd just want to create a single large aggregate, and put all your volumes on there.
An aggregate can have multiple raid groups in it, and they recommend that you add disks to aggregates in raid group chunks. So, if you assume that a RG (Raid Group) is 14 disks in DP mode, you'd have one aggregate with 6 RGs in it. They recommend that you put as many disks into one aggregate as you can, since otherwise you could be disk bound.
Then you'd have one FlexVol vol0 (shrunk down) and however many FlexVols you wanted/needed for you data. Max of 200 FlexVols per filer though, so you'll probably want FlexVols and qtrees still. Upto 4,995 qtrees per Vol or FlexVol.
Since Vols/FlexVols cannot span aggregates, creating multiple aggregates doesn't seem to be a win at all.
I haven't touched OnTap 7G yet, but we'll be getting it soon I hope.
John