Using P1 and P2 partitions on SSD drives as flashpool

[dmarkham_peak]

Customer has a FAS8300 with a single SSD shelf with 12x960GB SSD drives.   They have 2 x DS460C shelves with 10TB SATA drives.   They want to use ADP on the SSD drives (root-data-data) and put the root aggregates on there.  They do not want to use ADP on the 10TB drives.    In this configuration is it possible/supported/recommended to use the P1 and P2 partitions from the SSD drives for flashpool on the 10TB aggregates?

[SpindleNinja · Accepted solution]

Hello, unfortunately that is not supported.  drives can either be ADP or flashpool/storagepool. 

 https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/disks-aggregates/flash-pool-ssd-partitioning-aggregates-concept.html

[dmarkham_peak]

Thanks.   Makes sense I guess.   Be nice if we could put the P1 and P2s in a Storage Pool and use them for flashpool though.  In our situation they only really need the SSD for root and flashpool but can't do both it appears.

[AlexDawson]

if it's a new system... option 9 and wipe it and remove the partitions, then disconnect the SSDs and option 9 again and partition the SATA drives and put the root partition/volume on them, then when it's configured, add the SSDs and use them as flashpool. 

If there is data in place unfortunately this is not an easily achieved outcome (it's not impossible, just tricky)

[dmarkham_peak]

Thanks Alex.  Unfortunately we did not want to partition the SATA drives for the root aggregates since it causes other complications trying to create data aggregates with partitioned and non-partitioned drives.   We just reverted to using 3 full SATA drives for root aggrs.    This puts them in a better position down the road when they add more drives.   The system was apparently scoped for usable space calculated with the 3 full root drives per node so the customer is still getting the expected usable capacity.

[JonathanGaudette]

You can't manually designate what kind of partitions can be used for FlashPool.

Or, more specifically, you can't use ADP partitions for FlashPool.

FlashPool uses its own set of partitioned SSDs that are not part of a "normal" ADP provisioned system.

As an example, when disks are assigned to FlashPool, they get divided into four partitions (P1-P4).

ADPv1 creates P1 and P2 partitions (colloquially called "root+data") and ADPv2 creates P1, P2 and P3 partitions (called "root+data+data")