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Managing Volumes and LUNs

Managing Volumes and LUNs

Apr 13, 2023

Volumes provide a way to allocate storage available in a storage pool and share it over the network. The Volumes and LUNs section of SoftNAS allows you to create, edit, remove and manage storage volumes and their snapshots.

1. Volumes Grid

The Volumes Grid displays the list of storage volumes in a tabular grid format. The volume table has the following fields.

Field

Description

Field

Description

Volume Name

It is the name of the volume. You can click this name of a volume in the list to select it.

Storage Pool

It shows the name of the storage pool that is assigned to the volume.

Status

It shows the current status of the volume. Based on the status, it shows the following types of indicators:

  • ONLINE icon- indicates the volume and pool are online, healthy and operating normally.

  • DEGRADED icon -indicates the volume's pool is in a degraded state, continues to process data normally, but is at increased risk and requires attention; e.g., replace a failed disk in a RAID array.

  • UNAVAIL or FAILED icon indicates the volume's pool is in a failed state and is not currently processing storage requests. This usually means there are disk failures exceeding RAID protection.

% Used

It shows the percentage of available storage used. For thin-provisioned volumes, this is the percentage of the storage pool used. For thick-provisioned volumes, this is the percentage of the volume's allocated space used.

Total Used Space

It shows the amount of used up space in gigabytes.

Used by Snapshot

It shows the amount of space used by snapshots in gigabytes.

Used by Datasets

It shows the amount of space used by volume data sets in gigabytes.

Free Space

It shows the amount of free space available for use in gigabytes.

Total Space

It shows the total amount of space in the volume, in gigabytes. For thin-provisioned volumes, this is the same as the underlying storage pool's size. For thick-provisioned volumes, this is the volume size that was assigned.

Provisioning

It shows the provisioning type of the volume as Thick or Thin.

Optimizations

It shows the configured optimization option of the volume. The available options include the following:

  • None - no optimizations configured

  • Dedup - deduplication is enabled

  • Compress - data compression is enabled

  • Dedup+Compress - both deduplication and compression are enabled

Type

It shows the type of the volume. The available types of volume include:

  • Blockdevice – Refers to the volume that is a block device type, commonly used for iSCSI LUN creation and sharing. Block device mount points are in the /dev/ filesystem.

  • Filesystem- Refers to the volume that is a a filesystem type, commonly used for NFS and CIFS sharing (or FTP and other supported protocols).

Mountpoint

It shows the mount point used to access the volume in the Linux filesystem.

2. Creating a New Volume

From the Volumes and LUNs page, Click the Create button in the toolbar.  The Create Volume dialog will be displayed.
Enter the name of the volume in the Volume Name text entry box.
To select the storage pool where the storage space for the volume has to be reserved, click the Storage Pool button.

The Choose a Storage Pool dialog will be displayed.

Select the required storage pool from the list of available storage pools.
Click the Select Pool button.
Back in the Create Volume dialog, the name of the selected storage pool will be displayed in the Storage Pool field.

Select the type of the volume from the Volume Type section. The available volume types are File System (NFSv4, NFSv3, and/or, CIFS) or Block Device (iSCSI LUN).

 

One-click Sharing - SoftNAS supports one-click sharing during Volume creation. Choose the appropriate sharing option checkboxes to Export to NFS and/or Share via CIFS, Share Via AFP as appropriate. Verify the type of one-click sharing selected. The available options are Export via NFS, Share via CIFS for the File System volume type and Share as iSCSI LUN for Block Device volume type.

Block Device (iSCSI LUN)

If Block Device (iSCSI LUN) is selected during Volume Creation, the LUN Targets tab is displayed. You can use the LUN Targets tab to select an available iSCSI LUN Target as part of your create Volume workflow.
You are prompted to select the appropriate iSCSI LUN Target.



Select the type of the storage provisioning option. The available options include Thin Provision - Dynamically allocate space as it is needed and Thick Provision - Pre-allocate space from storage pool now.

Thin Provision and Thick Provision

  • Thin-provisioning allows a volume to acquire storage from its Storage Pool on an as-needed basis, as new data is written to the volume. Thin-provisioning enables many volumes to share a storage pool without an upper limit being placed on the volume itself (the only upper limit to the volume's size is available space in the pool).

  • Thick-provisioned volumes reduce the amount of space available in the Storage Pool by reserving this space for use by a specific volume. When a thick-provisioned volume reaches its maximum volume size, no more data can be written and a volume full error will be returned for writes to a full volume. Thick-provisioned volumes can be re-sized at any time to add space (or return space to the storage by by reducing the volume size).