Thin Prov / Dedupe

So I am in preparation to snapmirror our critical volumes to our DR filer. Part of this preparation includes thin provisioning and deduplication to minimize the data traveling across our pipe. To thin provision on our NetApp FAS2020 I first need to remove the guarantee on both the volume and the space reservation on the LUN. If you attempt to remove the guarantee on the volume to none you will get a message complaining that the fractional reserve needs to be set to 100%. This is to protect the LUN from writing past the extent of the volume. To avoid allocating 100% more space to the volume first set the LUN space reservation to none. Now you can set the fractional reserve to 100% without adding more space to the volume (the FR will NOT come into play once you set the vol guarantee to none). After setting the FR I then set the vol guarantee to none and viola! the volume is thin provisioned. Now to dedupe!

Last friday I had the unpleasant experience of rack-mounting a 170lbs IBM server aptly named Atlas. I am actively seeking a lighter replacement since the controller in it has since died and the rails are bending from the weight.

Update! SME on non-working Exchange server has since been abandoned. NetApp essentially threw the towel in and I was already rebuilding the mail server. We were having performance issues with that mail server anyway and it had been P2V'd and probably not done the right way. I have reinstalled the mail server from scratch and am in the process of migrating mailboxes over. SME and Snapdrive installed properly. So it was a flukey port issue with the other mail server. It would have been nice to drag a solution out of all the work but sometimes the only solution is to scrap it and start over from a clean slate.