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Aggregate creation workflow

Creating aggregates provides storage to volumes on your system. Beginning in ONTAP 9.4, you can let ONTAP recommend aggregate configurations for your system (auto-provision). If the auto-provision method is not available or appropriate in your environment, you can configure aggregates manually.


Aggregate creation workflow

  • Deciding which aggregate creation method to use
    Although aggregate creation with auto-provision is a best practice in ONTAP 9.4 and later, you must determine whether it is supported in your environment. If it is not, you must make decisions about RAID policy and disk configuration, and then create the aggregates manually.
  • Creating aggregates with auto-provision
    If the auto-provision method is appropriate in your environment, you run the storage aggregate auto-provision command to generate aggregate layout recommendations. You can then create aggregates after reviewing and approving ONTAP recommendations.
  • Default RAID policies for aggregates
    Either RAID-DP or RAID-TEC is the default RAID policy for all new aggregates. The RAID policy determines the parity protection you have in the event of a disk failure.
  • How to determine the number of disks or disk partitions required for an aggregate
    You must have enough disks or disk partitions in your aggregate to meet system and business requirements. You should also have the recommended number of hot spare disks or hot spare disk partitions to minimize the potential of data loss.
  • Creating aggregates manually
    Before you create aggregates manually, you should review disk configuration options and simulate creation. Then you can issue the storage aggregate create and verify the results.