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Learn about ONTAP quota resizing and reinitialization

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Resizing a quota is faster that reinitialization, however, if you make certain changes to your quotas, you must do a full quota reinitialization

ONTAP quota resizing

You can resize quotas when making the following types of changes to the quota rules:

  • Changing an existing quota.

    For example, changing the limits of an existing quota.

  • Adding a quota for a quota target for which a default quota or a default tracking quota exists.

  • Deleting a quota for which a default quota or default tracking quota entry is specified.

  • Combining separate user quotas into one multi-user quota.

Note

After you have made extensive quotas changes, you should perform a full reinitialization to ensure that all of the changes take effect.
Note

If you attempt to resize and not all of your quota changes can be incorporated by using a resize operation, ONTAP issues a warning. You can determine from the quota report whether your storage system is tracking disk usage for a particular user, group, or qtree. If you see a quota in the quota report, it means that the storage system is tracking the disk space and the number of files owned by the quota target.
Example quota changes that can be made effective by resizing

Some quota rule changes can be made effective by resizing. Consider the following quotas:

#Quota Target type             disk  files thold sdisk sfile
#------------ ----             ----  ----- ----- ----- -----
*             user@/vol/vol2    50M   15K
*             group@/vol/vol2  750M   85K
*             tree@/vol/vol2      -     -
jdoe          user@/vol/vol2/  100M   75K
kbuck         user@/vol/vol2/  100M   75K

Suppose you make the following changes:

  • Increase the number of files for the default user target.

  • Add a new user quota for a new user, boris, that needs more disk limit than the default user quota.

  • Delete the kbuck user's explicit quota entry; the new user now needs only the default quota limits.

These changes result in the following quotas:

#Quota Target type             disk  files thold sdisk sfile
#------------ ----             ----  ----- ----- ----- -----
*             user@/vol/vol2    50M   25K
*             group@/vol/vol2  750M   85K
*             tree@/vol/vol2      -     -
jdoe          user@/vol/vol2/  100M   75K
boris         user@/vol/vol2/  100M   75K

Resizing activates all of these changes; a full quota reinitialization is not necessary.

ONTAP quota reinitialization

Although resizing quotas is faster, you must do a full quota reinitialization if you make certain small or extensive changes to your quotas.

A full quota reinitialization is necessary in the following circumstances:

  • You create a quota for a target that has not previously had a quota (neither an explicit quota nor one derived from a default quota).

  • You change the security style of a qtree from UNIX to either mixed or NTFS.

  • You change the security style of a qtree from mixed or NTFS to UNIX.

  • You remove users from a quota target with multiple users, or add users to a target that already has multiple users.

  • You make extensive changes to your quotas.

Example of quotas changes that require initialization

Suppose you have a volume that contains three qtrees and the only quotas in the volume are three explicit tree quotas. You decide to make the following changes:

  • Add a new qtree and create a new tree quota for it.

  • Add a default user quota for the volume.

Both of these changes require a full quota initialization. Resizing does not make the quotas effective.