When you create a FlexGroup volume, you can choose to have ONTAP automatically provision the FlexGroup volume by selecting the underlying local tiers (aggregates). Local tiers are selected based on the best practices for optimum performance and capacity.

Before you begin

Each node in the cluster must have at least one local tier.

When creating a FlexGroup volume that will tier inactive data, each node must have at least one local tier with FabricPool enabled.

About this task

When you automatically provision a FlexGroup volume, ONTAP uses balanced placement (BP) to choose the local tiers and FlexGroup member (constituent) volumes layout. One aspect of BP is how it limits over-provisioning local tiers when creating 'none' guaranteed (thin-provisioned) FlexGroup volumes. The size of the overall FlexGroup volume is limited by the amount of free space on the local tier, although the limit is higher than it is for 'volume' guaranteed (thick-provisioned) FlexGroup volumes. When you create a FlexGroup volume using REST APIs or auto-provision-as with the ONTAP CLI, provisioning might fail because of insufficient space due to this limit. You can avoid this by creating smaller FlexGroup volumes, or by creating a FlexGroup volume and selecting the local tiers manually using the aggr-list parameter.

Steps

Provision the FlexGroup volume:

volume create -vserver svm_name -volume fg_vol_name –auto-provision-as flexgroup -size fg_size [–encrypt true] [-qos-policy-group qos_policy_group_name] [-support-tiering true] [-granular-data advanced]

You can enable advanced capacity balancing (-granular-data advanced in the CLI) to write data across multiple FlexGroup member volumes when files are larger than 10GB.

You can set the -encrypt parameter to true if you want to enable encryption on the FlexGroup volume. For creating an encrypted volume, you must have installed the volume encryption license and the key manager.

You must enable encryption on FlexGroup volumes at the time of creation. You cannot enable encryption on existing FlexGroup volumes.

Encryption of data at rest

The size parameter specifies the size of the FlexGroup volume in KB, MB, GB, TB, or PB.

The following example shows how to provision a FlexGroup volume of size 400 TB:
```
cluster-1::> volume create -vserver vs0 -volume fg –auto-provision-as flexgroup -size 400TB
Warning: The FlexGroup "fg" will be created with the following number of constituents of size 25TB: 16.
The constituents will be created on the following aggregates: aggr1,aggr2
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
[Job 34] Job succeeded: Successful
```
The following example shows how to create a QoS policy group for throughput ceiling and how to apply it to a FlexGroup volume:
```
cluster1::> qos policy-group create -policy group pg-vs1 -vserver vs1 -max-throughput 5000iops
```
```
cluster-1::> volume create -vserver vs0 -volume fg –auto-provision-as flexgroup -size 400TB -qos-policy-group pg-vs1
Warning: The FlexGroup "fg" will be created with the following number of constituents of size 25TB: 16.
The constituents will be created on the following aggregates: aggr1,aggr2
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
[Job 34] Job succeeded: Successful
```
The following example shows how to provision a FlexGroup volume of size 400 TB on local tiers with FabricPool enabled:
```
cluster-1::> volume create -vserver vs0 -volume fg –auto-provision-as flexgroup -size 400TB -support-tiering true -tiering-policy auto
Warning: The FlexGroup "fg" will be created with the following number of constituents of size 25TB: 16.
The constituents will be created on the following aggregates: aggr1,aggr2
Do you want to continue? {y|n}: y
[Job 34] Job succeeded: Successful
```
The FlexGroup volume is created with eight member volumes on each node in the cluster. The member volumes are distributed equally between the two largest local tiers on each node.

By default, the FlexGroup volume is created with the volume space guarantee setting except on ETERNUS AX/AC series. For ETERNUS AX/AC series, by default the FlexGroup volume is created with the none space guarantee.
Mount the FlexGroup volume with a junction path:

volume mount -vserver vserver_name -volume vol_name -junction-path junction_path
```
cluster1::> volume mount -vserver vs0 -volume fg2 -junction-path /fg2
```

After you finish

You should mount the FlexGroup volume from the client.

# mount -t nfs -o vers=3 192.53.19.64:/fg2 /mnt/fg2
# ls /mnt/fg2
file1  file2

Related information

qos policy-group create

ONTAP 9 Manuals ( CA08871-402 )

Provision an ONTAP FlexGroup volume automatically

On this page