Converting FAS to AFF Flash Essentials with in-memory write coalescing

[aachleman5]

If your customer wants to convert an existing FAS platform to AFF by adding all SSDs, you can manually turn on inline dedup and conpression but not in-memory write coalescing.  Is there a way to enable simply Flash Essentials on a FAS with SSDs?

[Jeff_Yao]

you dont need to do anything to enable that feature. it's part of how wafl works. system knows that's the ssds. so writes are coalesced in mem before being de-stage to ssd.

[NetApp_SEAL]

If a supported FAS platform (FAS8040, FAS8060, FAS8080) is intended to be "converted" into an AFF platform, there are boot loader arguments that need to be set in order for the feature within ONTAP to be enabled.

The following KB should help: https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&id=1015157&locale=en_US

Note that the assumption here is to only enable All-Flash FAS optimizations but does not make any changes to root partitioning as if if was a net-new AFF environment.

If that is the desired end-result, this KB can help: https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&actp=LIST&id=1015004