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Behavior of FlexGroup volumes when quota limits are exceeded

Starting with ONTAP 9.5, quota limits are supported on FlexGroup volumes. There are some differences in the way quota limits are enforced on a FlexGroup volume when compared to a FlexVol volume.

FlexGroup volumes might show the following behaviors when the quota limits are exceeded:

  • The space and file usage in a FlexGroup volume might reach up to 5 percent higher than the configured hard limit before the quota limit is enforced by rejecting further traffic.

    To provide the best performance, ONTAP might allow the space consumption to exceed the configured hard limit by a small margin before the quota enforcement begins. This additional space consumption does not exceed 5 percent of the configured hard limits, 1 GB, or 65536 files, whichever is lower.

  • After the quota limit is reached, if a user or administrator deletes some files or directories such that the quota usage is now below the limit, the subsequent quota-consuming file operation might resume with a delay (might take up to 5 seconds to resume).

  • When the total space and file usage of a FlexGroup volume exceed the configured quota limits, there might be a slight delay in logging an event log message.

  • You might get no space errors if some constituents of the FlexGroup volume get full, but the quota limits are not reached.

  • Operations, such as renaming a file or directory or moving files between qtrees, on quota targets, for which quota hard limits are configured, might take longer when compared to similar operations on FlexVol volumes.