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Managing aggregates

You create and manage your aggregates so that they can provide storage to their associated volumes.

  • RAID protection levels for disks
    ONTAP supports three levels of RAID protection for aggregates. Your level of RAID protection determines the number of parity disks available for data recovery in the event of disk failures.
  • 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.
  • Correcting misaligned spare partitions
    When you add partitioned disks to an aggregate, you must leave a disk with both the root and data partition available as spare for every node. If you do not and your node experiences a disruption, ONTAP cannot dump the core to the spare data partition.
  • Determining drive and RAID group information for an aggregate
    Some aggregate administration tasks require that you know what types of drives compose the aggregate, their size, checksum, and status, whether they are shared with other aggregates, and the size and composition of the RAID groups.
  • Relocating aggregate ownership within an HA pair
    You can change the ownership of aggregates among the nodes in an HA pair without interrupting service from the aggregates.
  • Assigning aggregates to SVMs
    If you assign one or more aggregates to a storage virtual machine (SVM, formerly known as Vserver ), then you can use only those aggregates to contain volumes for that SVM. Assigning aggregates to your SVMs is particularly important in a multi-tenancy environment.
  • How to determine space usage in an aggregate
    You can view space usage by all volumes in one or more aggregates with the aggregate show-space command. This helps you see which volumes are consuming the most space in their containing aggregates so that you can take actions to free more space.
  • Determining which volumes reside on an aggregate
    You might need to determine which volumes reside on an aggregate before performing operations on the aggregate, such as relocating it or taking it offline.
  • How you can determine and control a volume's space usage in the aggregate
    You can determine which FlexVol volumes are using the most space in the aggregate and specifically which features within the volume. The volume show-footprint command provides information about a volume's footprint, or its space usage within the containing aggregate.
  • Methods to create space in an aggregate
    If an aggregate runs out of free space, various problems can result that range from loss of data to disabling a volume's guarantee. There are multiple ways to make more space in an aggregate.
  • Commands for managing aggregates
    You use the storage aggregate command to manage your aggregates.