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System Manager Classic

Understanding space reservations for LUNs in System Manager - ONTAP 9.7 and earlier

Contributors netapp-aoife

Understanding how the space reservation setting (combined with the volume guarantee) in ONTAP System Manager classic (available in ONTAP 9.7 and earlier) affects how space is set aside for LUNs helps you to understand the ramifications of disabling space reservations. It also helps you to understand why certain combinations of LUN and volume settings are not useful.

When a LUN has space reservations enabled (a space-reserved LUN), and its containing volume has a volume guarantee, free space from the volume is set aside for the LUN at creation time; the size of this reserved space is governed by the size of the LUN. Other storage objects in the volume (other LUNs, files, Snapshot copies, and so on) are prevented from using this space.

When a LUN has space reservations disabled (a non-space-reserved LUN), no space is set aside for that LUN at creation time. The storage required by any write operation to the LUN is allocated from the volume when it is needed, provided sufficient free space is available.

If a space-reserved LUN is created in a none-guaranteed volume, the LUN behaves the same as a non-space-reserved LUN. This is because a none-guaranteed volume has no space to allocate to the LUN; the volume itself can only allocate space as it is written to, due to its none guarantee. Therefore, creating a space-reserved LUN in a none-guaranteed volume is not recommended; employing this configuration combination might provide write guarantees that are in fact impossible.

When the space reserve is set to “Default”, the ONTAP space reservation settings apply to the LUNs. ONTAP space reservation settings also apply to the container volumes if new volumes are created.