Volume attachment and capacity

Volume attachment

A volume represents a logical disk provisioned from a storage pool on a storage system.

A volume can be used by a single server (private) or can be used by multiple servers (shared). Use a private volume to boot from SAN.

You can attach volumes to one or more servers by configuring a volume attachment in the server profile. The volume attachment manages volume presentation on the storage system (StoreServ port selection, host and vLUN creation) as well as SAN zoning on SANs (with automatic zoning enabled) that connect the server and storage system. Volume attachments define datapaths between volumes and server profiles. To edit volume attachments, you must access them from the Server Profiles screen. The Volume Attachments view displays details about the associated server profile and storage paths.

Using volume templates, you can create multiple volumes with the same configuration.

Volume capacity

You can increase (grow) the capacity of a volume by editing it. You cannot decrease the capacity of a volume.

Growing a volume does not grow snapshots of the volume, and reverting a volume's state from a smaller snapshot can exhibit behavior specific to the storage system. See the storage system documentation to understand the exact behavior.

You can enable deduplication and compression for volumes only if the volume is thin-provisioned and meets the storage system requirements. For HPE Nimble Storage, the pool must also be deduplication-capable, which requires the array to be all flash (not hybrid), and the performance policy to have an application category assigned.

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