“Traditional” QoS policy groups can be assigned to individual workloads; for example, a single volume or LUN. In this case the workload can use the full throughput limit. QoS policy groups also can be assigned to multiple workloads; in which case the throughput limit is “shared” among the workloads. For example, a QoS limit of 9,000 IOPS assigned to three workloads would restrict the combined IOPS from exceeding 9,000 IOPS.

“Adaptive” QoS policy groups can also be assigned to individual workloads or multiple workloads. However, even when assigned to multiple workloads, each workload gets the full throughput limit instead of sharing the throughput value with other workloads. Additionally, adaptive QoS policies automatically adjust the throughput setting based on the volume size, per workload, thereby maintaining the ratio of IOPS to terabytes as the size of the volume changes. For example, if the peak is set to 5,000 IOPS/TB in an adaptive QoS policy, a 10 TB volume will have a throughput maximum of 50,000 IOPS. If the volume is resized later to 20 TB, adaptive QoS adjusts the maximum to 100,000 IOPS.

Starting with ONTAP 9.5 you can include the block size when defining an adaptive QoS policy. This effectively converts the policy from an IOPS/TB threshold to a MB/s threshold for cases when workloads are using very large block sizes and ultimately using a large percentage of throughput.

For shared group QoS policies, when the IOPS or MB/s of all workloads in a policy group exceeds the set limit, the policy group throttles the workloads to restrict their activity, which can decrease the performance of all workloads in the policy group. If a dynamic performance event is generated by policy group throttling, the event description displays the name of the policy group involved.

In the Performance: All Volumes view, you can sort the affected volumes by IOPS and MB/s to see which workloads have the highest usage that might have contributed to the event. In the Performance/Volumes Explorer page, you can select other volumes, or LUNs on the volume, to compare to the affected workload IOPS or MBps throughput usage.

By assigning the workloads that are overusing the node resources to a more restrictive policy group setting, the policy group throttles the workloads to restrict their activity, which can reduce the use of the resources on that node. However, if you want the workload to be able to use more of the node resources, you can increase the value of the policy group.

You can use System Manager, the ONTAP commands, or Unified Manager Performance Service Levels to manage policy groups, including the following tasks: