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Determine and control a volume's space usage in a local tier in ONTAP

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You can determine which FlexVol volumes are using the most space in a local tier and specifically which features within the volume.

The volume show-footprint command provides information about a volume's footprint, or its space usage within the containing local tier.

Note Prior to ONTAP 9.7, System Manager uses the term aggregate to describe a local tier. Regardless of your ONTAP version, the ONTAP CLI uses the term aggregate. To learn more about local tiers, see Disks and local tiers.

The volume show-footprint command shows details about the space usage of each volume in a local tier, including offline volumes. This command bridges the gap between the output of the volume show-space and aggregate show-space commands. All percentages are calculated as a percent of local tier size.

The following example shows the volume show-footprint command output for a volume called testvol:

cluster1::> volume show-footprint testvol

      Vserver : thevs
      Volume  : testvol

      Feature                                   Used    Used%
      --------------------------------    ----------    -----
      Volume Data Footprint                  120.6MB       4%
      Volume Guarantee                        1.88GB      71%
      Flexible Volume Metadata               11.38MB       0%
      Delayed Frees                           1.36MB       0%
      Total Footprint                         2.01GB      76%

The following table explains some of the key rows of the output of the volume show-footprint command and what you can do to try to decrease space usage by that feature:

Row/feature name

Description/contents of row

Some ways to decrease

Volume Data Footprint

The total amount of space used in the containing local tier by a volume's data in the active file system and the space used by the volume's snapshots. This row does not include reserved space.

  • Deleting data from the volume.

  • Deleting snapshots from the volume.

Volume Guarantee

The amount of space reserved by the volume in the local tier for future writes. The amount of space reserved depends on the guarantee type of the volume.

Changing the type of guarantee for the volume to none.

Flexible Volume Metadata

The total amount of space used in the local tier by the volume's metadata files.

No direct method to control.

Delayed Frees

Blocks that ONTAP used for performance and cannot be immediately freed. For SnapMirror destinations, this row has a value of 0 and is not displayed.

No direct method to control.

File Operation Metadata

The total amount of space reserved for file operation metadata.

No direct method to control.

Total Footprint

The total amount of space that the volume uses in the local tier. It is the sum of all of the rows.

Any of the methods used to decrease space used by a volume.
Related information

NetApp Technical Report 3483: Thin Provisioning in a NetApp SAN or IP SAN Enterprise Environment