Provisioning is a method or strategy of managing the logical devices (LDEVs), also called volumes, on a storage system. Some provisioning methods are host-based, while other methods use inherent storage system capabilities such as concatenated parity groups. Provisioning methods can also be primarily hardware-based or software-based. Each method has its particular uses and benefits in a specific storage environment, such as optimizing capacity, reliability, performance, or cost. When used in the right scenario, each method can be cost-effective, efficient, reliable, and straightforward to configure and maintain. Your support representatives are available to help you configure the highest quality solution for your storage environment.
Provisioning strategies fall into the following two fundamental categories:
- Basic provisioning (or traditional provisioning)Basic provisioning involves defining logical devices (LDEVs) on physical storage. Learn more...
- Thin provisioning (or virtual provisioning)Thin provisioning involves the use of virtualization to pool physical storage and provide on-demand allocation of volumes to hosts. Learn more....
- Child Topics
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- About Dynamic Provisioning
- Requirements for Dynamic Provisioning
The requirements for Dynamic Provisioning include license requirements, pool requirements, pool-VOL requirements, DP-VOL requirements, and page reservation requirements.
- Using Dynamic Provisioning and Dynamic Tiering with other software products
- Creating and deleting pools
You can use Device Manager - Storage Navigator to create and manage the pools on the storage system. You can view the capacity information for the pools and for the volumes in the pools, monitor performance using Performance Monitor, expand pool capacity, recover blocked pools, and delete pools.
- Managing and maintaining pools
- Creating and managing DP-VOLs
- Using external volumes larger than 4 TB
The data direct mapping attribute allows you to use an external volume larger than 4 TB without having to change its capacity.
- Virtual storage machine operations
- Troubleshooting for pools and DP-VOLs
- CCI command reference for provisioning operations
- About LUN Manager, logical units (LUs), and host groups
- Configuring Fibre Channel ports
- Configuring host groups
- Managing iSCSI targets
- Configuring iSCSI ports
- Mapping logical volumes to hosts
- Host modes and host mode options for host groups and iSCSI targets
- Finding the WWN of a host bus adapter
- About parity groups and volumes
- Parity groups: creating, formatting, and deleting
- Creating and deleting volumes
You can use the Device Manager - Storage Navigator software to create, edit, block, and delete the logical devices (LDEVs) on the storage system.
- Formatting volumes
If you initialize LDEVs that are being used, you will need to format the LDEVs.
- Managing MP unit assignment