Expanding FlexGroup volumes
You can add additional constituent volumes to your FlexGroup volume with the volume expand
command in the
ONTAP CLI. This is a best practice after adding high-availability (HA) pairs to your file system because it ensures that your FlexGroup volume stays balanced.
Before expanding your FlexGroup volume, consider the following points:
-
All of a FlexGroup's constituent volumes have the same storage capacity. When you expand your FlexGroup volume with additional constituents, each constituent is the same size as the existing constituents. Therefore, ensure that each aggregate has sufficient space available before adding constituents.
-
Amazon recommends maintaining eight constituent volumes per aggregate for each FlexGroup volume. Eight constituent volumes per aggregate maximizes the parallelism of FlexGroup volumes and offers the most optimal performance for your workload. Generally, we only recommend expanding your FlexGroup volume with additional constituents if you add HA pairs. This is the only scenario in which you would need to add constituents to maintain eight constituents per aggregate.
-
If your FlexGroup volume is in a SnapMirror relationship, then both the source and destination FlexGroup volumes need to have the same number of constituents. Otherwise, SnapMirror transfers will fail. SnapMirror operates at the constituent level and transfers data between each individual constituent. Therefore, if you expand a FlexGroup volume with additional constituent volumes, you must also manually expand any volume that is in a SnapMirror relationship with it.
-
When you expand a FlexGroup volume with additional constituents, all of its existing snapshot copies become "partial" copies. Partial copies can't be restored, but they can be browsed and the individual files can be restored. Additionally, this results in the loss of any incrementality for Amazon FSx backups, Amazon backups, or SnapMirror relationships.
-
You can't remove constituent volumes once you add them.
Adding FlexGroup volume constituents
You can use the ONTAP CLI to add constituent volumes to your FlexGroup volume.
To add FlexGroup volume constituents
-
SSH into your ONTAP file system. For more information, see Using the NetApp ONTAP CLI.
ssh fsxadmin@file-system-management-endpoint-ip-
address
-
Use the volume expand
ONTAP CLI command to expand your FlexGroup volume with additional constituents. Replace the following values: -
svm_name
with the name of the storage virtual machine (SVM) that hosts your FlexGroup volume (for example,svm1
). -
vol_name
with the name of the FlexGroup volume that you want to expand (for example,vol1
). -
aggregates
with a comma-separated list of aggregates that you want to add FlexGroup constituent volumes into. For example,aggr1
for a single aggregate oraggr1,aggr2
for multiple aggregates. -
constituent_per_aggregate
with the number of additional constituents that you want to add to each of the specifiedaggregates
. You should only add enough constituents to ensure that your FlexGroup volume has a balanced number of constituents across the aggregates it resides on.
::> volume expand -vserver
svm_name
-volumevol_name
-aggr-listaggregates
-aggr-list-multiplierconstituents_per_aggregate
-
Important
You can't remove FlexGroup constituents after you add them, so check your inputs before running the previous command.