Hello group.
We're having some performance issues with a FAS2050. The device has 2 controllers. Our problems seem to be with the aggregate under the control of controller 1. I'm not a storage guy. We have a small IT department and the FAS2050 was installed and configured a few years back by a consultant that we think didn't do a great job with the install.
We've run reallocate measure on the volumes in this aggregate and are getting a "4". For comparison, the aggregate on controller 2 comes back with a "2" and its performance is vastly better (I mean that, anectdotally our servers are much faster from the aggregate and the disk_busy are lower and the latency is great).
I can run the reallocate on the aggregate, but when it gets to this VMFS1 volume, it aborts with the message:
Reallocate scan for volume VMFS1 has stopped because there is insufficient free space.
I've tried this several different ways and just can't get it to run. Physically, the aggregate is 6 disks: 1 x parity, 1 x dparity, 3 x data and 1 x spare. All disk are 500gb. On the aggregate there are 3 volumes, vol0 is 8gb, vcb1 is 225 gb and VMFS1 is 800gb. The VMFS1 volume (and LUN) are for VMWare ESX. And that's the primary volume that I'm interested in reallocating. But, the entire 800gb in the volume is used up...no free space.
So what are the options in a case like this, just to add more disks? The one volume, vcb1, we could scrap because we don't need it anymore. So could I remove the vcb1 volume and make that space available to VMFS1 volume? If so, how would I do that and could I do that without shutting down the ESX farm that access the VMFS1 volume (we use iSCSI for our connectivity)?
We're not sure of our support contract with NetApp and have not opened a case with them. We're trying to figure this thing out and fix it, and hopefully learn something in the process.
Thanks for your help.
chad dietterick