InfoScale™ 9.0 Storage Foundation Administrator's Guide - Windows
- Overview
- Setup and configuration
- Function overview
- About the client console for Storage Foundation
- Recommendations for caching-enabled disks
- Configure basic disks (Optional)
- About creating dynamic disk groups
- About creating dynamic volumes
- Set desired preferences
- Using the GUI to manage your storage
- Working with disks, partitions, and volumes
- Adding storage
- Disk tasks
- Remove a disk from the computer
- Veritas Disk ID (VDID)
- General Partition/Volume tasks
- Mount a volume at an empty folder (Drive path)
- Expand a dynamic volume
- Shrink a dynamic volume
- Basic disk and volume tasks
- Automatic discovery of SSD devices and manual classification as SSD
- Volume Manager space allocation is SSD aware
- Dealing with disk groups
- Disk groups overview
- Delete a dynamic disk group
- Detaching and attaching dynamic disks
- Importing and deporting dynamic disk groups
- Partitioned shared storage with private dynamic disk group protection
- Fast failover in clustered environments
- iSCSI SAN support
- Settings for monitoring objects
- Event monitoring and notification
- Event notification
- Configuring Automatic volume growth
- Standard features for adding fault tolerance
- Performance tuning
- FlashSnap
- FlashSnap components
- FastResync
- Snapshot commands
- Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join
- Dynamic disk group join
- Using Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join with a cluster on shared storage
- Dynamic Disk Group Split and Join troubleshooting tips
- Fast File Resync
- Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
- Using the VSS snapshot wizards with Enterprise Vault
- Using the VSS snapshot wizards with Microsoft SQL
- Copy on Write (COW)
- Using the VSS COW snapshot wizards with Microsoft SQL
- Configuring data caching with SmartIO
- Typical deployment scenarios
- About cache area
- Configuring SmartIO
- Frequently asked questions about SmartIO
- Dynamic Multi-Pathing
- Configuring Cluster Volume Manager (CVM)
- Configuring a CVM cluster
- Administering CVM
- Access modes for cluster-shared volumes
- Storage disconnectivity and CVM disk detach policy
- Unconfiguring a CVM cluster
- Command shipping
- About I/O Fencing
- Administering site-aware allocation for campus clusters
- SFW for Hyper-V virtual machines
- Introduction to Storage Foundation solutions for Hyper-V environments
- Live migration support for SFW dynamic disk group
- Preparing the host machines
- Configuring the SFW storage
- Administering storage migration for SFW and Hyper-V virtual machine volumes
- Optional Storage Foundation features for Hyper-V environments
- Microsoft Failover Clustering support
- Configuring a quorum in a Microsoft Failover Cluster
- Implementing disaster recovery with Volume Replicator
- Volume encryption
- Secure file system (SecureFS) for protection against ransomware
- Troubleshooting and recovery
- Using disk and volume status information
- Resolving common problem situations
- Commands or procedures used in troubleshooting and recovery
- Rescan command
- Repair volume command for dynamic mirrored volumes
- Additional troubleshooting issues
- Disk issues
- Volume issues
- Disk group issues
- Connection issues
- Issues related to boot or restart
- Cluster issues
- Dynamic Multi-Pathing issues
- vxsnap issues
- Other issues
- CVM issues
- Appendix A. Command line interface
- Overview of the command line interface
- vxclustadm
- vxvol
- vxdg
- vxclus
- vxdisk
- vxassist
- vxassist (Windows-specific)
- vxsd
- vxedit
- vxdmpadm
- vxcbr
- vxsnap
- vxscrub
- vxschadm
- sfcache
- Tuning SFW
- Appendix B. VDID details for arrays
- Appendix C. Executive Order logging
Working with disks that support thin provisioning
Thin provisioning is a technology to allocate disk storage on an as needed basis. Disks that support thin provisioning are disks that can allocate storage as data is written to the disk. In addition, some of these disks can reclaim unused storage on the disk.
Disks that support thin provisioning have the following characteristics:
Disk storage allocated as data is written to the disk.
Unused storage may be reclaimed to minimize the amount of unused space on the disk.
Note:
Not all disk vendors support storage reclamation. Disks that support both thin provisioning and storage reclamation are represented in the VEA GUI as a disk with a green colored sector with an asterisk (*). Disks that support only thin provisioning are represented in the VEA GUI as a disk with a red colored sector.
Thin provisioning and reclamation is enabled on TRIM and UNMAP-supported devices. UNMAP is the default reclamation interface for devices that support thin provisioning, except for SSDs. For SSDs that support TRIM, the default reclamation interface is TRIM.
Reclaiming storage space from thin provisioned disks can be done for disk groups, disks, or volumes. The table briefly describes SFW wizards and CLI commands that support reclaiming unused storage.
Table:
Wizard | CLI Command | Description of Operation |
---|---|---|
Disk group Reclaim Wizard | vxdg reclaim | This wizard and CLI command can reclaim unused storage from the volumes and disks that reside in the disk group. Each can be set up to reclaim storage space from volumes; to reclaim free space from disks; or to reclaim from both volumes and disks that reside in the disk group. |
Disk Reclaim Wizard | vxdisk reclaim | This wizard and CLI command can reclaim unused storage from a disk. |
Volume Reclaim Wizard | vxvol reclaim | This wizard and CLI command can reclaim unused storage from a volume. |
The timeout value for the reclaim I/O operations is set to 30 seconds by default. However depending on the configuration, the storage reclaim operation may sometimes take a significant amount of time to complete.
To avoid the reclaim I/O failures due to timeout errors, you can change the reclaim I/O timeout value by adjusting the following registry tunable parameter:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VERITAS\VxSvc\CurrentVersion\VolumeManager
\MaxReclaimIOTimeOut\VolumeManager\MaxReclaimIOTimeOut
Thin provisioning reclaim operation is blocked on the following:
RAID-5, DCO, or Volume Replicator DCM volumes
FAT, FAT32, or raw dynamic volumes
Volumes configured for snapshots
Note:
The reclaim storage operation is disabled during a shrink volume operation. The reclaim storage operation is enabled when the shrink volume operation has completed.