VA 7110: What does "balancing in progress" mean?

[Dirk Rosinski]

VA 7110: What does balancing in progress mean? I read that balancing means migration of Data from Raid 5 to Raid 0+1. The VA is in Autoraid mode but all data should be in Raid 0+1 because only 50 % is allocated.
Maybe the rebuild of a failed disk requires a balancing like the progress on nike disk array.
Thanks in advance!
Dirk

[Eugeny Brychkov · Accepted solution]

Dirk,
rebuild: disk fails, and VA should rearrange and reconstruct data from remainders so there would be no redundancy loss;
balancing: when new disk (capacity) is added VA fills this disk with data from other disks (balances data across disks);
optimizing: moving data across RAID levels.
Your VA is optimizing - this means that some time ago VA discovered some additional capacity. This could be because of:
- you've added disk(s);
- some disks were failed, rebuild completed and then you changed this disk (or you did unfail this disk).
Please note that balancing is low-level job and its priority can not be increased (like rebuild's) thus to make VA balanced please keep hosts quiet for some time. If not, then optimization can take days (or maybe even weeks, depending on how VA is used)
Eugeny