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Data Ontap 7.2

Can I resize an aggregate on the fly and add the freed up space to a different aggregate?

I have an aggregate that is low on space and another that has plenty and need to balance the two out.

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4 Answers 4

up vote 7 down vote accepted

You can add to an aggregate.

But you can't take away, unfortunately.


Beware that if you do add to an existing and very full aggregate then you can end up with "hot disks". This is caused by the member RAID group/disks being unbalanced in used capacity, so all new data will hit the new disks. If it's a large set then it should be fine. But if it's just one or two disks then it can cause more problems than it solves.

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Thanks to all that helped out. –  TheCleaner Jul 8 '09 at 18:05

I would use snapmirror to migrate some of the volumes in the full aggregate to the empty one.

The maximum size for an aggregate is 16TB in ontap 7. You can't use synchronous snap mirror between partner pairs ( its all to do with how the changes get replicated ) so I suspect it will have to be async snapmirror.

If you don't have a snap mirror license you will either have to ask for an eval or use ndmpdump.

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I've also successfully used "vol copy" from the console to migrate volumes. It basically does the dumping for you but without the snapmirror. Of course, needs to be done when the volumes are not in use. –  Kevin Kuphal Jul 8 '09 at 16:51
Bear in mind that some models have lower aggr limits. –  Dan Carley Jul 8 '09 at 16:55

I don't believe you can resize an aggregate on a NetApp filer. You can add additional disks but I believe in order to add them you would have to destroy the other aggregate in order to free the disks.

From the documentation, it states in places that you cannot remove disks from a RAID group

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You can resize the aggr in netapp.data lose may occur when shrink the aggr size.but, you can increase the aggr size on fly.But, before check the free disk size.

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I believe this is technically inaccurate. Aggregates cannot be sized downwards. As this post and others have pointed out, aggregates can be grown on the fly. –  damorg Nov 25 '09 at 15:22

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