Thin reclaim suported on NetApp?
I recently identified a need to shrink the provisioned size of a very large server that mounts its disks from a NetApp filer. While researching my options (sdelete and SnapDrive being the most common methods) I discovered that Storage Foundation recently began supporting thin disk reclamation through the SCSI WRITE_SAME command. Furthermore, NetApp themselves have announced that they are participating in this and have provided Symantec with the necessary APIs to perform this agains a NetApp filer
however, I am not able to use the vxdisk reclaim feature against our NetApp disks, and in the HCL for 5.1 sp2 NetApp is still listed as not supporting thin reclaim.
Does anyone know if there is a later hotfix which introduces this? Or is this a feature that is supported, but only for Unix?
Hi Oschistad,
There is not a patch at this time that will provide support for thin provisioning on NetApp arrays with SFW. SFW's Support for thin provisiong would allow the relaimation commands to be run from within VEA. This does not mean that you cannot use thin provisioned luns or that you cannot run reclaimation commands manually outside of VEA.
In your case I would recommend that you go to 5.1 SP2 the latest CP. Then perform the following:
1. Backup your data.
2. Clean up the volume so that the spaced used is less than 15 TB.
3. Backup your data again (I'm overly cautious.)
4. In SFW, shrink the volume to 15 TB - freeing up one of your 15 TB luns.
*********** This step (4) is the one that I'm unconfortable with. Make sure that you stop all access to the volume and perform a check disk on the volume before performing this operation. This operation if it goes wrong may corrupt the entire volume. Use at your own risk.
5. Remove the unused 15TB lun from the disk group.
6. Perform operations on the NetApp array to destroy the unused 15 TB lun, reclaim its space and then recreate the 15 TB lun with the correct settings.
7. Add the newly recreated 15 TB lun back to the disk group.
8. Mirror the volume from the old 15 TB lun to the newly recreated 15 TB lun.
9. When mirror is in sync, remove the mirror plex that is on the old 15 TB lun.
10. Remove the now unused old 15 TB lun from the disk group.
11 Perform operations on teh NetApp array to destroy the unused 15 TB lun, reclaim its space and then recreate the 15 TB lun with the correct settings.
12. Add the newly recreated 15 TB lun to the disk group.
13. Expand the volume to use the newly recreated 15 TB lun.
Thanks,
Wally