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SANtricity 11.8

Enable or disable resource provisioning on existing volume groups and pools

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For any DULBE-capable drives, you can enable or disable resource provisioning on existing volumes in a pool or volume group.

Resource provisioning is a feature available in the EF300 and EF600 storage arrays, which allows volumes to be put in use immediately with no background initialization process. All drive blocks assigned to the volume are deallocated (unmapped), which can improve SSD wear life and increase maximum write performance.

By default, resource provisioning is enabled on systems where the drives support DULBE. There is no need to enable resource provisioning unless you have previously disabled it.

Before you begin

  • You must have an EF300 or EF600 storage array.

  • You must have SSD volume groups or pools, where all the drives support the NVMe Deallocated or Unwritten Logical Block Error Enable (DULBE) error recovery capability. Otherwise, the resource provisioning option is not available.

About this task

When you enable resource provisioning for existing volume groups and pools, all volumes in the selected volume group or pool are changed to allow the blocks to be deallocated. This process might involve a background operation to ensure consistent allocation at the unmap granularity. This operation does not unmap any space. Once the background operation completes, the operating system needs to unmap any unused blocks to create free space.

When you disable resource provisioning for existing volume groups or pools, a background operation rewrites all the logical blocks in every volume. Existing data remains intact. The writes will map or provision the blocks on the drives associated with the volume group or pool.

Note For new volume groups and pools, you can enable or disable resource provisioning from Settings › System › Additional Settings › Enable/Disable Resource-Provisioned Volumes.
Steps

  1. Select Storage › Pools & Volume Groups.

  2. Select one pool or volume group from the list.

    You can select only one pool or volume group at a time. Scroll down the list to see additional pools or volume groups.

  3. Select Uncommon Tasks, and then either Enable resource provisioning or Disable resource provisioning.

  4. In the dialog box, confirm the operation.

Note If you re-enabled DULBE — After the background operation completes, you might need to reboot the host so it detects the DULBE configuration changes, and then remount all the filesystems.