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Create block pools

Create pools so you can create volumes.

Creating a pool

Use the basic option to take advantage of tiers that are based on best practices.

If you want more flexibility and do not need to take advantage of best practices, you can use the advanced option to select specific parity groups.

You cannot create pools on external parity groups. They must be created outside Storage Advisor.

The types of pools are as follows:

  • HDP (Dynamic Provisioning), which is functionality that allocates virtual volumes to a host and uses the physical capacity that is necessary according to the data write request.
  • Tiered, which is used with Dynamic Provisioning and places data in a hardware tier according to the I/O load. For example, a data area that has a high I/O load is placed in a high-speed hardware tier, and a data area that has a low I/O load is placed in a low-speed hardware tier.
  • HTI (Thin Image), which stores snapshot data in pools. A pool consists of multiple pool-VOLs. The pool-VOLs contain the snapshot data. A pool can contain up to 1,024 pool-VOLs.

Creating a pool, basic method

Use the basic method of pool creation to create pools based on best practices.

Before you begin

Create and configure parity groups on the storage system.

You need a minimum of four parity groups of the Bronze, Silver, or Gold tiers, or one parity group of the Platinum tier to create a pool using the basic method. Otherwise, you can use the advanced method of pool creation.

License requirements:

  • For a Dynamic Tiering pool: Dynamic Tiering
  • For a Thin pool: Dynamic Provisioning
  • For a Thin Image pool: Thin Image
  • For active flash: active flash

Procedure

  1. On the Storage Advisor dashboard, click Storage Systems to see the inventory of registered storage systems.

  2. Click a storage system to create a pool for it.

  3. Click Pools.

  4. Click the plus sign (+) to open the Create Pool page.

    By default, the Basic option is selected. create pools basic
  5. Enter a Pool Label.

    Pool labels can contain only alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores. Initial hyphens are not allowed.
  6. In the Select capacity from Tiers to Allocate to Pool pane, you can choose storage from 1, 2, or a maximum of 3 tiers (Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze).

    • If you select only one tier, you can use the Intend to use for ? toggle to decide whether to use Snap pools.
      • Click Yes to create Snap pools.
        NoteUse this option if you want to use data protection to create snapshots. You can also create a pool for snapshots later by returning to the Create Pool page.
      • Click No to create Dynamic Provisioning (DP) pools. These pools can also be used to create snapshots.
    • If you select two or three tiers, the system creates Tiered pools. The following options are available for a Tiered pool:
      • Tiering: Select Automatic or Manual monitoring and tier relocation.
      • Cycle Time: Select the cycle of performance monitoring and tier relocation. For automatic tiering, select one of the monitoring cycles from drop down. Cycle time can be 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 or 24 hours.
      • Monitoring Period: When 24 hours is selected in the cycle time list, specify the time from 00:00 to 23:59 (default value), in which performance monitoring is to be performed. Set one or more hours between the starting time and the ending time. The starting time must not be later than the ending time.
      • Monitoring: Specifies the monitoring mode. If you perform the tier relocation weighted to the past period monitoring result, select Continuous. If you perform the tier relocation on the specified cycle, select Periodical.
      • Relocation Speed: Specifies the page relocation speed. You can set the speed to: 1 (Slowest), 2 (Slower), 3 (Standard), 4 (Faster), or 5 (Fastest). The default is 3 (Standard). If the speed specified is slower than 3 (Standard), the data drive load is low when tier relocation is performed.
      • Buffer Space for Relocation: Specifies the storage area that is necessary for processing tier relocation. Set this as percentage of the tier size. For each tier enter an integer value from 2 to 40 as the percentage to set for that tier. The default value for each tier is 2%.
      • Buffer Space for New Page Assignment: Specifies the storage area that is necessary for processing new page assignments. Set this as a percentage of the tier size. For each tier enter an integer value from 0 to 50 as the percentage to set for that tier. For tier 1, this value must be between 0 and 50. The default value is 8% for all drive types.
      NoteTiering, Cycle Time, Monitoring Period and Relocation Speed can only be set in environments with an SVP.
    Table 1: Tier definitions
    Tier Disk type
    Platinum FMD, FMD DC2, SSD, SSD(RI), FMD HDE
    Gold SAS 15 k
    Silver SAS 10 k
    Bronze SAS 7.2 k
  7. Click a selected tier to view the available storage capacity and select a capacity size.

  8. Click Tier Management to see the disk type, capacity, and speed of each pool category.

  9. Review the high and low pool utilization thresholds. The thresholds will serve as the Warning and Critical thresholds for monitoring capacity. Adjust the thresholds if needed.

    If you are creating a Thin(DP) pool you can also choose whether to permanently suspend snapshots when usage exceeds the Critical threshold to reserve capacity for user data. If the threshold is exceeded, the pairs become suspended (PSUE) and the S-VOLs can never accept read-write operations. You can still write to P-VOLs. If this option is selected, a message displays in the Utilization graph in the detail page for the pool.
    NoteThis option is available for the following storage systems:
    • VSP F1500, VSP G1000, and VSP G1500 with microcode version 80-05-4x and later.
    • VSP F400, F600, F800 and VSP G200, G400, G600, G800 with firmware version 83-04-4x and later.
    • VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 and VSP G350, G370, G700, G900.
  10. Select the Subscription Limit % checkbox to set the limit to Unlimited.

    Note Subscription Limit % is not applicable to Snap pools or to the following storage systems: VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 and VSP G350, G370, G700, G900.
  11. Click Submit.

Results

A job is started to allocate the storage capacity and create the pool.

Creating a pool, advanced method

You can use the advanced method of pool creation to select parity groups filtered by disk type, speed, layout, and RAID level. This method does not employ best practices.

NoteMixing different disk types in a Thin pool is not recommended. If you choose to create such a pool, Storage Advisor identifies the tier in this pool as "mixed".

Before you begin

Create and configure parity groups on the storage system.

License requirements:

  • For a Dynamic Tiering pool: Dynamic Tiering
  • For a Thinpool: Dynamic Provisioning
  • For a Thin Image pool: Thin Image
  • For active flash: active flash

Procedure

  1. On the Storage Advisor dashboard, click Storage Systems to see the inventory of registered storage systems.

  2. Click a storage system to create a pool for it.

  3. Click Pools.

  4. Click the plus sign (+) to open the Create Pool page and click Advanced. GUID-FB85F7DB-5D8F-4565-A185-E7830FB4AE66-low.png

  5. Enter a Pool Label.

    Pool labels can contain only alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores. Initial hyphens are not allowed.
  6. Select Yes under Intend to enable DDM if you want to use the pool to migrate volumes greater than 4 TiB.

  7. Click the Type list and choose one of the following; DP, Tiered, or Snap. You can create snapshots on HDP pools as well as on Snap pools.

    The following options are available for a tiered pool :

    • Tiering: Select Automatic or Manual monitoring and tier relocation.
    • Cycle Time: Select the cycle of performance monitoring and tier relocation. For automatic tiering, select one of the monitoring cycles from drop down. Cycle time can be 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 or 24 hours.
    • Monitoring Period: When 24 hours is selected in the cycle time list, specify the time from 00:00 to 23:59 (default value), in which performance monitoring is to be performed. Set one or more hours between the starting time and the ending time. The starting time must not be later than the ending time.
    • Monitoring: Specifies the monitoring mode. If you perform the tier relocation weighted to the past period monitoring result, select Continuous. If you perform the tier relocation on the specified cycle, select Periodical.
    • Relocation Speed: Specifies the page relocation speed. You can set the speed to: 1 (Slowest), 2 (Slower), 3 (Standard), 4 (Faster), or 5 (Fastest). The default is 3 (Standard). If the speed specified is slower than 3 (Standard), the data drive load is low when tier relocation is performed.
    • Buffer Space for Relocation: Specifies the storage area that is necessary for processing tier relocation. Set this as percentage of the tier size. For each tier enter an integer value from 2 to 40 as the percentage to set for that tier. The default value for each tier is 2%.
    • Buffer Space for New Page Assignment: Specifies the storage area that is necessary for processing new page assignments. Set this as a percentage of the tier size. For each tier enter an integer value from 0 to 50 as the percentage to set for that tier. For tier 1, this value must be between 0 and 50. The default value is 8% for all drive types.
    NoteTiering, Cycle Time, Monitoring Period and Relocation Speed can only be set in environments with an SVP.
  8. Choose whether to enable active flash, which requires capacity from the Platinum tier.

  9. Click Tier Management to see the definitions of disk type, capacity, and speed of each pool category.

  10. Select one or more parity groups to use to create the pool. You can scroll through the parity groups to use search and filter functions.

    • For a Snap pool, select one or more parity groups with identical disk types.
    • For a DP pool, select one or more parity groups with identical disk types.
    • For a Tiered pool, select one or more parity groups with two or three disk types.

    Storage Advisor shows the total size of the pool using the selected parity groups.

  11. Set the utilization thresholds, or use the default threshold settings.

    The thresholds are used as the Warning and Critical thresholds for Capacity Monitoring. If you are creating a (DP) pool you can also choose whether to permanently suspend snapshots when usage exceeds the Critical threshold to reserve capacity for user data. If the threshold is exceeded, the pairs become suspended (PSUE) and the S-VOLs can never accept read-write operations. You can still write to P-VOLs. If this option is selected, a message displays in the Utilization graph in the detail page for the pool.
    NoteThis option is available for the following storage systems:
    • VSP F1500, VSP G1000, and VSP G1500 with microcode version 80-05-4x and later.
    • VSP F400, F600, F800 and VSP G200, G400, G600, G800 with firmware version 83-04-4x and later.
    • VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 and VSP G350, G370, G700, G900.
  12. The subscription limit can be set above 100%. Select the Subscription Limit % checkbox to set the limit to Unlimited.

    NoteSubscription Limit % is not applicable to Snap pools or to the following storage systems: VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 and VSP G350, G370, G700, G900.
  13. Click Submit.

Results

A job is started to allocate the storage capacity and create the pool.

 

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