You can automatically provision a FlexGroup volume. ONTAP creates and configures a FlexGroup volume by automatically selecting the aggregates. Aggregates are selected based on the best practices for optimum performance.

What you’ll need

Each node in the cluster must have at least one aggregate.

For creating a FlexGroup volume for FabricPool in ONTAP 9.7, each node must have at least one aggregate that is FabricPool.

About this task

ONTAP selects two aggregates with the largest amount of usable space on each node to create the FlexGroup volume. If two aggregates are not available, ONTAP selects one aggregate per node to create the FlexGroup volume.

Steps

Provision the FlexGroup volume:

If you are using…

Use this command…

ONTAP 9.7 or later

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]

You can create FlexGroup volumes for FabricPool. To automatically provision a FlexGroup volume on FabricPool, you must set the -support-tiering parameter to true. The volume guarantee must be always set to none for FabricPool. You can also specify the tiering policy and tiering minimum cooling period for the FlexGroup volume.

Disk and aggregate management

You can specify a throughput ceiling (QoS Max) for FlexGroup volumes, which limits the performance resources that the FlexGroup volume can consume. Beginning with ONTAP 9.7, you can specify throughput floors (QoS Min) and adaptive QoS for FlexGroup volumes.

Performance management

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 in ONTAP 9.7:

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 aggregates in FabricPool in ONTAP 9.7:

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 constituents on each node in the cluster. The constituents are distributed equally between the two largest aggregates 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