topic Re: Root Aggregate in Network and Storage Protocols

Root Aggregate

itjpadmin — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:23:43 GMT

Is there anyway to not have 4 disks in the root aggregate? I was told by the reseller that we could have just 2 drives in the root for each controller which we planned for. However now that I have it I don't see that as an option. I have done tons of looking around and cannot find any details. Thank you in advance for any help.

Ryan

Re: Root Aggregate

stratify_tc — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:14:03 GMT

Ryan,

Your best bet is to do it from the CLI, and the syntax will look like this:

aggr create little_aggr -t raid4 -n 2

where "little_aggr" is the name that you want to give it.

From there, on an existing system you can move all of the data of the root volume over using this procedure:

https://now.netapp.com/Knowledgebase/solutionarea.asp?id=kb6360

I have done it before and it works like a charm.

Best of luck!

Re: Root Aggregate

erick_moore — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:23:08 GMT

Well my question would first be why do you want to do this? If you don't want to waste disks, then I would recommend sharing your root aggregate with other data. I know NetApp states that best practices is not to do this, but you need to understand the reason behind that logic. The reasoning is if you have some sort of problem that causes a "WAFL iron" your data on the aggregate that contains the root volume will not be available until the scan is completed. Now, this occurance is becoming more and more rare as the code continues to improve. I can't see any situation in our environment that would cause that, and the fact is if your SAN is going into a state where it needs to run that check chances are you are already in some hot water. It is your call, but I think a lot of customers now do not have a dedicated aggregate for their root volume.