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Cloud Manager 3.7
A newer release of this product is available.

Storage management

Contributors netapp-bcammett
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Cloud Manager provides simplified and advanced management of Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage.

Important All disks and aggregates must be created and deleted directly from Cloud Manager. You should not perform these actions from another management tool. Doing so can impact system stability, hamper the ability to add disks in the future, and potentially generate redundant cloud provider fees.

Storage provisioning

Cloud Manager makes storage provisioning for Cloud Volumes ONTAP easy by purchasing disks and managing aggregates for you. You simply need to create volumes. You can use an advanced allocation option to provision aggregates yourself, if desired.

Simplified provisioning

Aggregates provide cloud storage to volumes. Cloud Manager creates aggregates for you when you launch an instance, and when you provision additional volumes.

When you create a volume, Cloud Manager does one of three things:

  • It places the volume on an existing aggregate that has sufficient free space.

  • It places the volume on an existing aggregate by purchasing more disks for that aggregate.

  • It purchases disks for a new aggregate and places the volume on that aggregate.

Cloud Manager determines where to place a new volume by looking at several factors: an aggregate's maximum size, whether thin provisioning is enabled, and free space thresholds for aggregates.

Tip The Account Admin can modify free space thresholds from the Settings page.

Disk size selection for aggregates in AWS

When Cloud Manager creates new aggregates for Cloud Volumes ONTAP in AWS, it gradually increases the disk size in an aggregate, as the number of aggregates in the system increases. Cloud Manager does this to ensure that you can utilize the system's maximum capacity before it reaches the maximum number of data disks allowed by AWS.

For example, Cloud Manager might choose the following disk sizes for aggregates in a Cloud Volumes ONTAP Premium or BYOL system:

Aggregate number Disk size Max aggregate capacity

1

500 MB

3 TB

4

1 TB

6 TB

6

2 TB

12 TB

You can choose the disk size yourself by using the advanced allocation option.

Advanced allocation

Rather than let Cloud Manager manage aggregates for you, you can do it yourself. From the Advanced allocation page, you can create new aggregates that include a specific number of disks, add disks to an existing aggregate, and create volumes in specific aggregates.

Capacity management

The Account Admin can choose whether Cloud Manager notifies you of storage capacity decisions or whether Cloud Manager automatically manages capacity requirements for you. It might help for you to understand how these modes work.

Automatic capacity management

The Capacity Management Mode is set to automatic by default. In this mode, Cloud Manager automatically purchases new disks for Cloud Volumes ONTAP instances when more capacity is needed, deletes unused collections of disks (aggregates), moves volumes between aggregates when needed, and attempts to unfail disks.

The following examples illustrate how this mode works:

  • If an aggregate with 5 or fewer EBS disks reaches the capacity threshold, Cloud Manager automatically purchases new disks for that aggregate so volumes can continue to grow.

  • If an aggregate with 12 Azure disks reaches the capacity threshold, Cloud Manager automatically moves a volume from that aggregate to an aggregate with available capacity or to a new aggregate.

    If Cloud Manager creates a new aggregate for the volume, it chooses a disk size that accommodates the size of that volume.

    Note that free space is now available on the original aggregate. Existing volumes or new volumes can use that space. The space cannot be returned to AWS or Azure in this scenario.

  • If an aggregate contains no volumes for more than 12 hours, Cloud Manager deletes it.

Management of inodes with automatic capacity management

Cloud Manager monitors inode usage on a volume. When 85% of the inodes are used, Cloud Manager increases the size of the volume to increase the number of available inodes. The number of files a volume can contain is determined by how many inodes it has.

Manual capacity management

If the Account Admin set the Capacity Management Mode to manual, Cloud Manager displays Action Required messages when capacity decisions must be made. The same examples described in the automatic mode apply to the manual mode, but it is up to you to accept the actions.