Tech note about capacity based thin provision licensing
Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:01 am
So our T800s were specced/sold with TP licenses less than the total capacity of the systems. The main reason for that was to meet our pricing goals, but this has presented itself a new management challenge. The amount of allowed TP space is a metric not reported in the capacity reports, and requires a combination of things put together in a spreadsheet to track manually.
So how is this a tech problem and not just a licensing/budget issue? Capacity initially configured as thin provisioned, eventually gets full, and depending on the circumstances may not be "thin reclaimable". To my knowledge, there is no non-disruptive method to convert a TPVV to a fully provisioned VV. Tech wise, thats a silly task with little to no physical benefit... however, that will free up licensed TP capacity in the system for use elsewhere, if you're so constrained.
The solution is undetermined as of yet. It does not appear you can use setvv to change it to a fully provisioned volume nor does it appear that tunevv (dynamic optimizer) will do it either. Perhaps a "physical copy" could be used to get there, however, that requires an outage to queuece, copy, and replace the luns visible to the host.
So how is this a tech problem and not just a licensing/budget issue? Capacity initially configured as thin provisioned, eventually gets full, and depending on the circumstances may not be "thin reclaimable". To my knowledge, there is no non-disruptive method to convert a TPVV to a fully provisioned VV. Tech wise, thats a silly task with little to no physical benefit... however, that will free up licensed TP capacity in the system for use elsewhere, if you're so constrained.
The solution is undetermined as of yet. It does not appear you can use setvv to change it to a fully provisioned volume nor does it appear that tunevv (dynamic optimizer) will do it either. Perhaps a "physical copy" could be used to get there, however, that requires an outage to queuece, copy, and replace the luns visible to the host.