LUNs - qtrees - VServer

CHRISTOPHULRICH — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:18:52 GMT

Hello NetApp Community,

I've attached an illustration of the hierarchy of the NetApp "storage fragmentation" which I made for the intern usage in my company. Now I want to know three things of which I am not really sure about:

On which position in the illustration can I put a qtree and what is the qtree for? I've read that its analog to a subdirectory in e.g. the Windows filesystem.
Is the position of the LUN properly? I've read the following about a LUN and the reason of its usage:

"Some applications need local storage, they just can't seem to write data into a NAS (think CIFS or NFS) share. Microsoft Exchange and SQL are this way. They require local hard drives. So the solution is a LUN."
What else can I do with LUNs?

3. On which position in the illustration can I put a VServer and what is the VServer for? I've read the following about VServers:

"VServers are needed to serve data in a cluster. At least one VServer is needed in a cluster to serve data to the clients. A VServer can be stretched over more than one aggregate."
Could you tell me some more about VServers? Why do I need them, why can't a Windows client just map a CIFS share to get data?

I hope you can throw light on these topics for me.

Thank you in advance!

Greetings,

Christoph Ulrich

Re: LUNs - qtrees - VServer

radek_kubka — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:09:30 GMT

Hi Christoph and welcome to the Community!

Qtrees are basically folders/subdirectories within a NetApp volume - you can share a qtree, instead of a whole volume. You can also apply quotas to qtrees

You can also put a LUN inside a qtree, but it doesn't make much practical difference - unless you use SnapVault and/or Qtree SnapMirror replication.

VServer is specific to Cluster-Mode only (there is similar thing called vFiler in 7-Mide) & it is a sort of a virtual filer - you can do logical separation of your resources using it.

Regards,

Radek

topic Re: LUNs - qtrees - VServer in Data Protection

LUNs - qtrees - VServer

Re: LUNs - qtrees - VServer