Quotas in C-DOT

Clustered ONTAP does away with the traditional configuration files, such as for snapmirror, rc (initialisation) and in this case quotas.

In 7-mode, the biggest challenge with quotas (when configured in a secure multi tenant environment) was configuring them for vfilers as this could only be done with a CLI copy/paste - making one adjustment to a 200-line quotas file was extraordinarily painful and dangerous (due to the STDIN buffering issues with ONTAP characters would often be omitted).

C-DOT allows this configuration to be applied from the cluster management shell with the SVM specified as an option.

Quota Policies

A quota policy is a set of quota rules for the volumes contained within the SVM. An SVM can only have one quota policy assigned to it at any given time.

FILER01:> volume quota policy create -vserver data_svm01 -policy-name data_quota_policy
FILER01:> vserver modify data_svm01 -quota-policy data_quota_policy

Quota Policy Rules

Each policy contains one or more rules.
A volume can only have one rule associated with it and a rule can only be associated with a single volume

FILER01:> volume quota policy rule create -vserver data_svm01 -policy-name data_quota_policy -type tree -target fileshare01 -qtree cifs01 -disk-limit 20GB

It is questionable as to whether a quota policy is actually a "policy" (as in it could be seamlessly rolled out to multiple other SVMs), however I think NetApp are simply trying to align terminology and possibly permit proper policy behaviour in the future. For now, you still need to manually align the policy rules with each SVM and each volume, therefore it isn't much of a policy, I'd consider quotas an attibute of a volume and/or qtree. perhaps they were unable to impose attibutes unpon a qtree therefore had to use plicy groups attached to a volume but containing a qtree name.

Activating policy rules

Similar approach to 7-mode - activate quota accounting for a given volume

FILER01:> volume quota on -vserver data_svm01 -volume fileshare01

If modifying a policy rule, you can update the volume quota accounting using

FILER01:> volume quota resize -vserver data_svm01 -volume fileshare01

Reporting on quota accounting

FILER01:> volume quota report -vserver data_svm01 -volume fileshare01

Quotas in C-DOT - the future?

I have heard much discussion that quota accounting is not the desired direction for C-DOT (including surprise from several PS engineers who didn't think it would work even in 8.2). Rest assured, I have it working beautifully at the moment, but it is possible that it may change in the future.