Auto-Grow Maximum and Volume Size?

bowie_poag — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:00:30 GMT

Here's the short version:

Q: Is it possible to have a situation where a volume can be physically larger than its auto-grow maximum?

Here's the long version:

We have a tool we've written here in house that checks two things -- First, to see if all of our volumes have auto-grow enabled, and second, whether or not the auto-grow maximum is set sufficiently high that we don't at some point face a situation where we have a volume or LUN go offline on us unexpectedly.

This tool has been performing nicely...but the other morning, we noticed something unusual in the syslog output of one of our filers; that ONTAP was having trouble auto-growing the size of a particular volume. Here's the cut 'n paste of what we see (Note: replaced the actual volume name for 'foo', for employer confidentiality)

wafl.vol.autoSize.fail:info]: Unable to grow volume 'foo' to recover space: Volume cannot be grown beyond maximum growth limit #015.

So, we had a look at the volume from the command line. Here's what we saw:

>vol size foo
vol size: Flexible volume 'foo' has size 5t.

>df -g foo
Filesystem               total       used      avail capacity Mounted on
/vol/foo/     5120GB      912GB     4207GB      18% /vol/foo/
/vol/foo/.snapshot        0GB        0GB        0GB     ---% /vol/foo/.snapshot

>vol autosize foo
Volume autosize is currently ON for volume 'foo'.
The volume is set to grow to a maximum of 3000 GB, in increments of 63 GB.

So, long story short, it looks like (to us) that it's possible to have a volume that had, at one point, an auto-grow maximum set...but was later exceeded by _manually_ increasing its size. Is this possible/legal in ONTAP? Or is the notion of an auto-grow maximum and a volume size maximum two independent ideas?

Cheers,

Bowie

Re: Auto-Grow Maximum and Volume Size?

paul_wolf — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:38:35 GMT

Yes, you can manually grow a FlexVol beyond the maximum size specified by autogrow. Been there, done that and yes, it's kinda annoying 🙂

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Auto-Grow Maximum and Volume Size?

Re: Auto-Grow Maximum and Volume Size?