Provisioning policies
A provisioning policy is an entity that defines a set of rules for allocating capacity from a pool. Any volumes that are created in the pool adopt the capacity-saving methods that are defined in the provisioning policy.
An administrator or security administrator can use a provisioning policy to define a set of rules that are applied when volumes are created within a storage pool. When a provisioning policy is assigned to a storage pool, all the volumes that are created in the pool automatically get the capacity savings that are defined by the policy. Provisioning policies allow a simpler and consistent provisioning process that can be used with external automation software. The capacity savings for existing volumes do not change if the provisioning policy is removed from the storage pool or a different policy is applied. A provisioning policy defines only the capacity savings that are used when you create new volumes in the pool.
- None (-capacitysaving none)
- Use the none option when you don’t want volumes to use any additional capacity savings. With this option, volumes use only the built-in capacity saving functions of the storage pool. For example, pools containing certain drive types, such as FlashCore Module drives, are self-compressing.
- Thin-provisioning (-capacitysaving thin)
- Use the thin-provisioning option to indicate that all volumes in a pool use thin-provisioning to
save capacity. Thin-provisioning allocates capacity only when data is written to storage.You can optionally define the following attributes:
- Buffer size: indicates the capacity in the storage pool that a thin-provisioned volume attempts to reserve as a buffer.
- Warning threshold: indicates the threshold at which a warning is shown for the used capacity of thin-provisioned volumes.
- Compression (-capacitysaving compressed)
- Use the compression option to indicate that all volumes in a pool use compression to save capacity. Compression reduces the capacity that data requires by removing unnecessary content from the data.
- Deduplication (-deduplicated)
- Use deduplication when you create a new provisioning policy to add deduplication to your capacity saving for a data reduction pool. Both compression and thin-provisioning capacity saving can be used with deduplication to increase capacity savings for data reduction pools. Standard pools do not support deduplication.
You can rename a provisioning policy after the policy is created. However, the capacity savings option of a provisioning policy cannot be changed. To change the capacity savings to be used for new volumes, create and assign a new provisioning policy to the storage pool, replacing any existing policy. The old policy can be deleted if it is no longer required. A provisioning policy can be associated with multiple pools. However, a pool can only have one policy.
The capacity savings for a volume can be changed after a volume is created. A provisioning policy for a storage pool is only applied when new volumes or volume copies are created.
After you add a provisioning policy to a pool, or assign a different provisioning policy, use the addvolumecopy command to convert existing volumes to use the capacity savings of the new provisioning policy. The -autodelete parameter can be used to automatically delete the original copy of the volume after the new copy is synchronized.
To configure provisioning policies in the GUI, select . Assign the provisioning policy to a pool using the panel .
To configure provisioning policies on the CLI, use mkprovisioningpolicy. You can add a provisioning policy to a pool using mkmdiskgrp or chmdiskgrp.