topic Deduplication and Storage vMotion in ONTAP Discussions

Deduplication and Storage vMotion

bsnyder27 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:31:59 GMT

We are in the process of migrating VMs from our current FAS to a new FAS. Current is running OnTap 8.3.2 and new OnTap 9.1 and volumes are mounted NFSv3.

After migrating a fair number of VMs and enabling efficiency on the new volume, the effiiciency job completed. Hours later and it's still showing 0% savings for the volume.

Is there any way that the deduplication of the VMs could be preserved when performing an svmotion between two separate clusters like this?

Re: Deduplication and Storage vMotion

asulliva — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 17:33:23 GMT

Hello @bsnyder27,

Unfortunately not without using storage array level replication, like SnapMirror, to move the entire datastore followed by performing a cutover...which is a disruptive operation (the VMs would need to be shutdown, removed from inventory at the old location, then re-added from the new).

Did you enable (post-process) deduplication after the data was added to the volume? If so you'll need to do

volume efficiency start -vserver <vserver_name> -volume <volume_name> -scan-all

Hope that helps.

Andrew