Managing provisioning policies

A provisioning policy of a pool defines how to provision new volume capacity. Use the management GUI interface or command-line interface to manage provisioning policies.

With a provisioning policy, an administrator or security administrator can define the new volume capacity to be provisioned within a pool.

For existing pools, you can assign new provisioning policies. Any new volumes that are created and assigned to the pool automatically adopt the capacity savings method that is defined in the provisioning policy. Older volumes in the pool retain their capacity savings method that was defined on the volume when it was created.

You can migrate existing volumes in the pool to use a new provisioning policy by creating a copy of the volume within the pool. When the volume is migrated, you can delete the original copy of the volume from the pool.

Migrating volumes to use provisioning policies

A provisioning policy defines how new volume capacity must be provisioned within a pool. You can migrate volumes to use the provisioning policy of a pool with the addvolumecopy command. The volume migrates to take on the characteristics of the provisioning policy associated with the pool. The old volume copy can be deleted automatically.

You can use the command-line interface (CLI) to migrate volumes to use a provisioning policy. To migrate a volume to use a provisioning policy, complete the following steps:

To view provisioning policies that are configured on the system, enter the following command:
```
lsprovisioningpolicy
```
Verify the capacity savings method and whether the deduplication flag is assigned. Deduplication is only supported on data reduction pools and can be added to both capacity savings methods. Standard pools support only compression and thin-provisioning.
To create a new pool that uses the specified provisioning policy, enter the following command:
Standard pool
To create a standard pool, enter the following command:
```
mkmdiskgrp -name pool_name -ext extent_size -provisioningpolicy policy_name | policy_id
```
where policy_name | policy_id is the name of the provisioning policy to assign to the standard pool.
Data reduction pool
To create a data reduction pool, enter the following command:
```
mkmdiskgrp -name pool_name -ext extent_size -datareduction yes -provisioningpolicy policy_name | policy_id
```
where policy_name | policy_id is the name of the provisioning policy to assign to the data reduction pool.
To create a copy of the original volume in the new pool that uses the provisioning policy, enter the following command:
```
addvolumecopy -pool pool_name -autodelete volume_name
```
where -pool name is the new pool name where the provisioning policy is assigned. A volume copy is created in the new pool and the newly created volume copy takes all the characteristics of the policy that is associated with that pool.
Note: The preceding example uses the -autodelete parameter to indicate that the system automatically deletes the source volume of the copy. If you do not specify this parameter, you can delete the original volume copy manually after the migration process has completed.