topic Re: Setting Limits on Folders in Aggregates in ONTAP Discussions

Setting Limits on Folders in Aggregates

Harisheldon — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:35:51 GMT

Greetings All,

This question concerns not the sizing of the volume, lun, or gtree, but that of the folders that reside in the qtree.

What I have are units that have given their users a place for personal data. In this place, qtree, they are given 1GB per user. Of course, there is always someone who goes over their limit so that the other person cannot store their data because all of the room has been taken by a couple of greedy users.

Is there a way in which I can limit the sizes of the user folders within the qtree? I know that Microsoft has a way to do this, but you cannot use it with NetApp.

As always, any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance.

James

Re: Setting Limits on Folders in Aggregates

colsen — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 15:37:23 GMT

A "folder" in this context is really a Windows logical object that Data ONTAP doesn't really have any control over. It can be a little cumbersome to get established, but the team in our organization that manages user/project storage has an automated provisioning mechanism whereby each entity gets its own qtree (and therefore its own quota). Each qtree is then just shared to the user(s) for their storage needs.

I know this doesn't address your original request - but NetApp gives you two ways of managing quotas (volume and qtree) so I suspect you'll really have to organize your storage provisioning based on those mechanisms.

Hope that helps,

Chris

Re: Setting Limits on Folders in Aggregates

Harisheldon — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 18:16:16 GMT

I was afraid of that. The powers that be wanted me to find a way to lock users down to their 1GB limit, and I had already told them that NetApp did not have that function, and to create qtrees for each users is not only a waste of space, but also time. Thanks anyway.

Re: Setting Limits on Folders in Aggregates

colsen — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 19:31:16 GMT

Hello,

I can understand that qtrees can be time consuming if manually, but if you set up a quick script to do the qtree creation and resulting share provisioning, it can go pretty smoothly. Don't even need to use anything like WFA - if you have your user list you can just scrape that and generate the provisioning script and let it run.

Insofar as "space" is concerned - other than an inode or two pointing to the qtree, as long as you've thin-provisioned everything it won't cost you any more space than having a volume with a bunch of empty folders in it.

Good luck,

Chris