Currently I have a FAS 3170 in active/active configuration. 4 trays of disks, each tray has 14 disks that make up a RAID-DP group. Therefore there are a total of 4 raid groups. 2 trays of disks have been assigned to each controller. Each of the controllers disks have been combined into an Aggregate, making a total of 2 aggregates in the array consisting of 28 disks per aggregate. Each aggregate contains 3 volumes for a total of 6 volumes in the array.
What I would like to achieve here is to combine all 56 disks (the 4 raid groups/trays) into a single aggregate. The aim of this is to improve read/write performance of the array by essentially doulbing the number of spindles available for io operations.
The array is soon to be taken out of production and available for a teardown/rebuild so it would be good to know if this setup is:
a) worthwhile doing
b) actually technically possible and if so, the best way to do this
c) a supported and/or recommended practice by NetApp (this isn't a big thing but good to know regardless)
Some other information that may be of use:
- The array is used only for VM's in a VMware environment.
- Each controller has 2 physical nics.
- Current disk io is very low and usually 60-70% read, 70-80% random.
Any feedback on the above would be great, thanks!
