topic Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions in ONTAP Discussions

Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

f_duranti — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:29:59 GMT

Hi, I've some strange (in my opinion) behaviour on the allocated space on snapmirrored volume on secondary storage.

I've some volume replicated from a primary to a secondary storage and I was expecting that the allocated space on the snapmirrored volume (with guarantee=none) was about the same as the source used space.

The source volume have guarantee=file, I've changed one to guarantee=none (to have the same setting on source/destination) and I've done a Snapmirror update but nothing changed.

This is the situation:

Source:

Volume	Allocated	Used	Guarantee
DPI_Data	210GB	209GB	none
DPI_Exe	52GB	51GB	file
DPI_Log	1017MB	968MB	file
DPI_Temp	65MB	4248KB	file

Destination:

Volume	Allocated	Used	Guarantee
DPI_Data_BK	277GB	209GB	none
DPI_Exe_BK	119GB	51GB	none
DPI_Log_BK	69GB	912MB	none
DPI_Temp_BK	68GB	4740KB	none

As you can see the first 2 are 210/52 GB allocated on the source and 277/119 allocated on the destination. It seems a bit strange ...

There's anything I can check?

The Data Ontap version is 7.3.6P2.

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

aborzenkov — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:04:34 GMT

For a start - is it VSM or QSM?

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

scottgelb — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:28:28 GMT

What is the output of "vol size volname" on source and target? Sounds like the volume sizes don't match...bigger is ok on the target but fs_size_fixed right sizes anyway (if VSM).

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

f_duranti — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:08:28 GMT

The relation are VSM.

The volume was created with OnCommand and provisioned as secondary (so their size was the size of the aggregate where they live but with guarantee=none and fs_size_fixed they should allocate as much as the source).

Those are the data of one of the volumes in source and destination:

Source

vol size DPI_Exe

vol size: Flexible volume 'DPI_Exe' has size 100g.

vol status -b DPI_Exe

Volume Block Size (bytes) Vol Size (blocks) FS Size (blocks)

------ ------------------ ------------------ ----------------

DPI_Exe 4096 26214400 26214400

vol options DPI_Exe

nosnap=on, nosnapdir=on, minra=off, no_atime_update=on, nvfail=off,

ignore_inconsistent=off, snapmirrored=off, create_ucode=on,

convert_ucode=on, maxdirsize=31457, schedsnapname=ordinal,

fs_size_fixed=off, compression=off, guarantee=file, svo_enable=off,

svo_checksum=off, svo_allow_rman=off, svo_reject_errors=off,

no_i2p=off, fractional_reserve=100, extent=off, try_first=volume_grow,

read_realloc=off, snapshot_clone_dependency=off

Destination:

vol size DPI_Exe_BK

Warning: Volume 'DPI_Exe_BK' has fs_size_fixed option set. The file system

size may differ from the volume size.

See 'vol status -b' for more detail.

vol size: Flexible volume 'DPI_Exe_BK' has size 12898827840k.

vol status -b DPI_Exe_BK

Volume Block Size (bytes) Vol Size (blocks) FS Size (blocks)

------ ------------------ ------------------ ----------------

DPI_Exe_BK 4096 3224706960 26214400

vol options DPI_Exe_BK

nosnap=on, nosnapdir=on, minra=off, no_atime_update=on, nvfail=off,

ignore_inconsistent=off, snapmirrored=on, create_ucode=on,

convert_ucode=on, maxdirsize=31457, schedsnapname=ordinal,

fs_size_fixed=on, compression=off, guarantee=none, svo_enable=off,

svo_checksum=off, svo_allow_rman=off, svo_reject_errors=off,

no_i2p=off, fractional_reserve=100, extent=off, try_first=volume_grow,

read_realloc=off, snapshot_clone_dependency=off

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

aborzenkov — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 02:54:50 GMT

So far my only idea is - primary had so much data at some point and secondary did not yet catch up. Ho w often is snapmirror run?

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

f_duranti — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:57:11 GMT

Snapmirror is donne 1 time a day and the data on those volumes is quite stable, as you can see the used space is almost the same on source and secondary.

On the Exe volume the allocated on secondary is also greater than the volume size on the primary (119 vs 100 gb).

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

RENAUD_TOUILLET — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:07:18 GMT

Hello Francesco,

Did you find a reason? I have the same behavior. All my destination volumes are ~74GB bigger than the source for the allocated space.When you have hundreds of volumes it begins to eat a lot of space!

I'm also using VSM managed by DFM 5.

Thanks.

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

jakob_bena — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:57:57 GMT

Maybe this can help you to find your miss configuration.

open CLI to source and destination filer. then try to update / restart your snap mirror.

in your terminal session, you can see the problem of your snapmirror.

post this output, and then we can help you.

regards

jakob

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

RENAUD_TOUILLET — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:21:14 GMT

Hello Jakob,

Thanks for the answer. I don't have any issue with replication it self. It works perfectly. The only question is why SM (or maybe DFM, who knows with this ugly tool) create a volume with ~70GB more on the allocated space than the source volume...

Source:

Volume Allocated Used Guarantee

cifs_source 380492464KB 377732840KB none

Destination

Volume	Allocated	Used	Guarantee
cifs_destination	454097184KB	377379144KB	none

Used size is almost the same BUT allocated is ~70GB more than the source. And it's the same behavior for all volumes

Any idea?

Thanks

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

aborzenkov — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:35:09 GMT

As guarantee is set to “none”, allocated size does not really matter from space consumption PoV. It could be safety measure in case your source volume grows (just guessing).

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

frank_iro — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:26:41 GMT

I had a similar issues sometime back. Someone suggested that the space allocated for the destination volume may be equal to the volume auto-grow maximum size setting on the source volume. This would make sense as the destination cannot be resized (fs_size_fixed is on), so you'd need to make sure it's as large as the maximum size the source volume could grow to.

Re: Snapmirror destination volume allocated/used space questions

LTDCLSERGAO — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 09:51:05 GMT

Hello,

Could you give the result of " df -h cifs_source" and "df -h cifs_destination" ?