Enabling Storage Efficiency

[GODSADMIN]

While trying to enable storage efficiency on a volume that contains an active LUN I'm getting an error from the DataONTAP API saying there's insufficient disk space.  Somehow I didn't enable SE when I created the VOL to house the LUN and now of course the LUN is in production in a VM server running Domino.  Is there a way to enable SE on that volume without destroying the LUN?  And this is a email server where users "respond with attachments"  to senders that love huge documents...and they do it over and over ad nauseum.

Data ONTAP API Failed :Not enough disk space for the operation

[nigelg1965]

Hi

In order to run SE it will need to create a snapshot, this can be big sometimes especially if you are doing dedup and compression.

I seem to remember dedup is not recommended for Domino vols, but you can't have compression without dedup although you have dedup without compression.

Have you got thin prov'd on both the volume and the lun? that can save you up to 50% of the space before any SE.

Also in Domino there are something you can do to single instance attachments etc, I think it's called DAOS.

If all else fails, you may need to at least temporarily grow the volume or may be delete some snapshots.

If you are seeing lots of free space in the host but not on volume / lun, a defrag in Windows or "space reclaim" within snapdrive can help, the later does require low or no date change rate.

Hope this helps.

[GODSADMIN]

Hi, Nigel,

No, I am not using thin provisioning.   It is exactly the deduplication feature in SE that I want.  Currently Domino is not config'd for DAOs.  Perhaps I should explore that option instead.  I was also thinking that the data could be drastically reduced due to the exchanging of identical emails ad infinitum.  I cannot grow the volume because there is no more room on the aggregate...(I wonder if that is a problem?).   The host volume is not currently doing snapshot copies, although there is a reserve set.   I not sure how snapshot copies would help unless end users are able to do individual email restores...which I doubt. 

[nigelg1965 · Accepted solution]

If you've no snapshot how are you backing it up? to tape or disk device or is it snapmirror to another site?

Reducing / removing the volume's snapshot reserve may not help, it's that space I suspect the storage dedup process is trying to use. Aggregate snapshot could be reduced / removed to give you some wiggle room. Everyone will tell you having aggregates at 100% is not a good idea, and it isn't but I know it can't be avoided sometimes.

If it's a case of you just don't have space in that particular volume and do have another volume you can present as an additional lun then there's always the Domino database / directory link facility. http://www-12.lotus.com/ldd/doc/domino_notes/rnext/help6_admin.nsf/f4b82fbb75e942a6852566ac0037f284/17088061ddd9191c85256c1d0039b36f?OpenDocument

Going back to snapshots, when we had Domino (we moved to Exchange a couple of years ago) we used snaps as easy way to recover mail files if they became corrupt or when the user did something stupid. You just mount the required snapshot version of the lun, temporarily, as a extra drive and drag and drop the nsf file somewhere else, normally outside of the Domino data directory structure.

Also, have checked for full text indices in the Domino data directories, these can be huge and are created when a user does a full text search. I think you can disable their creation on the server.

[GODSADMIN]

We are backing up to disk.  I have scheduled SnapShot copies.  And I think I will implement DAOs on the server instead of using Dedupe. 

Thanks, Nigel for all the help.