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Best Practice for Volumes

 
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HMUSER
Advisor

Best Practice for Volumes

I am setting up the companies first SAN and have a quick question about which is the best way to provision volumes.

 

Is it best to provision 1 volume and place in all my department folders on that volume?

 

Or what I was thinking of doing is to create a volume for each department which will give me greater control over snapshots, etc but how will this effect performance on both the SAN and the server having 15 volumes.

4 REPLIES 4
andre_muc
Occasional Advisor
Solution

Re: Best Practice for Volumes

Hi,

 

i think it is dependent of you backup strategic plan.

if you plan to do backup via offhost backup i think more volumes make sens (if job cancel at one volume).

our fileserver have 25 volumes with no error about handling and you can better set user quotas

 

hope it helps!

 

Regards

 

Andre

ftepe
Advisor

Re: Best Practice for Volumes

Hi,

 

I'm not quite sure but I think the limitation of the MPIO DSM is by about 64 connections...

 

I don't know how much data each department has because this is important for your backup plan. Personally I'm not a fan of creating volumes larger then 2TB...

Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

Re: Best Practice for Volumes

Hi,

 

All mentioned above is correct...

 

On topof that, don't worry about that 64... There are only 26 letters in the alphabet so if you have a Windows file servers with already at least a C: drive you can have a max of 25 other drives...

 

Most important reasons for multiple volumes however is performance... try to split up the type ofdata accross different volumes... Profile data from (Citrix or TS) users are a lot of small files which you don't want to put together with the files from the technical (Autocad) department, which are commonly big files... This is also killing for performance.

Take a look at the best practices also for database servers where the data and log files must be split up.

 

On file volumes of 2TB I hope you will not get any corruption in the file system... A ScanDisk can take for days! And there is no CTRL-C to stop the process.... Can your customer live with a fileserver offline for several days?

 

 

Kr,

Bart

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HMUSER
Advisor

Re: Best Practice for Volumes

Thats great i will go with what i was intending to do which is a volume per department. Most volumes wont be any bigger than 1Tb and will give me greater control over quotas, backup procedures and increasing and decreasing volume sizes for each department.