topic Re: Best practice: One volume - one LUN or one Volume - several LUNs? in ONTAP Hardware

Best practice: One volume - one LUN or one Volume - several LUNs?

areti — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:46:54 GMT

Hello!
On NepApp FAS2750, I need to create LUNs that will be connected to Windows servers like logical drives.
What is the best practice strategy?
Create your own Volume for each LUN:
first volume -> first LUN
second volume -> second LUN and so on.
Or is it more correct to create one large volume and create the required number of LUNs on this volume?

Re: Best practice: One volume - one LUN or one Volume - several LUNs?

kahuna — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 13:54:08 GMT

for performance purposes it is best to create multiple volumes as each is getting assigned to a subset of the overall CPU, hence, a single volume will get limited resources

Re: Best practice: One volume - one LUN or one Volume - several LUNs?

paul_stejskal — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 15:19:42 GMT

I don't know that it's a "best practice", but each volume gets its own affinity, and you can have parallelization issues. That said, I've seen an A700 on FCP with multiple LUNs hitting 7 GB/s on all reads. We have some optimizations starting in 9.3 which make this better.

The biggest thing is to have multiple LUNs I'd say either way per host for performance. On a 2750 this is probably not a big deal since it's a low end platform, but if you can stripe your LUNs you'll get best performance from a threading standpoint.