Resizing a NAS Volume Making It Smaller

[djkraxner]

I have inherited a Camera Security System that was designed and implemented by an employee who is no longer with the company. The storage for the video is a NetApp FAS2050 that has a single aggregate containing 6.55TB. The storage is divided up with three volumes, VOL0 (671GB - with 536GB available), VOL1 (2.9TB with 62.93GB available), and VOL2 (2.9TB with 63.02GB available). Volumes VOL1 and VOL2 are presented to two Windows 2008 servers via LUN1 and LUN2 respectively. Each LUN is sized at 2.84TB, with a type of "WINDOWS", and space as "RESERVED". This effectively presents two 2.84TB disk drives to the two Windows 2008 video recording servers. The amount of actual data on the Windows 2008 server disks is only .55TB.

I need to add a third recording server, but the current architecture of the NetApp Volume and LUN structure (or perhaps my lack of expertise thus far with the NetApp) is preventing me from being able to create a storage area (a third volume and LUN) for the third recording server. I would like to resize the existing volume and LUN's to make them smaller by a third each in ordder to free up space to create a third volume and LUN. Can this be done without losing the data currently on the existing storage space? If so, would someone be so kind as to educate me on how to do so. My company is a not for profit health care organization that does not have a lot of money for consulting. Thank you in advance for anyone who helps.

[aborzenkov]

You can shrink NetApp FlexVol at any time, there is no problem.

As for LUN – Windows 2008 supports shrinking of partition; see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731894.aspx for conditions when it may not be possible. If you have SnapDrive license, newer versions (last one is 6.2) support shrinking of LUNs and I would recommend using SD for it. If you do not have SD, you may still be able to manually shrink partition as described in the above article and then shrink LUN on NetApp side. I did not try it myself to be honest, so you are advised to test it in non-production environment first.

Another possibility – again, if you have SnapDrive – to go thin provisioning route. You need SD because it can reclaim unused space in file system so that LUN physically takes up exactly as much space as is logically used.

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With best regards

Andrey Borzenkov

Senior system engineer

Service operations