We are running OneFS 7.1.0.6. It appears that limiting the amount of disk space reported to users is only available via a hard quota. Or am I missing something?

we have critical application running on Isilon as well, hard quotas are in place with very aggressive notification when soft quotas have been breached. Gives app owners plenty of time to react.

yep, option to "Show Available Space as" is only available for hard quotas. If you are going to allow users to write beyond the hard limit then why even bother with quotas. If it's simply for "bill back/show back", maybe using an advisory quota would help with that ? I am curious to hear about your use-case.

Can you give me an example of the aggressive soft quotas you have in place?

We are using our Isilon cluster for "system type" data. Applications which are writing to the array. My manager wants to limit the amount of space a user might see if they attach directly to the Isilon. If a user's application needs 5TB and they see the full size of the cluster, our users will think they hit the jackpot and start storing their fantasy football and vacation pictures on the Isilon. Thus we like the concept of the hard quotas. However, because there are critical applications running, we do not want to prevent writes.

I am thinking that I will need to convince my manager to implement hard quotas and setup Advisory Limits at 80% of capacity. I was hoping I was missing something in the setup of the quotas. Or that there is a workaround.

Thanks for the information and your time.

Dynamox, what is the volume size in your SLA in case of say 10 TB hard and 8 TB soft limit?

Curious

-- Peter

Peter, what do you mean by volume size ?

my clients pay for capacity based on hard quota, so hard quota is set to what they are paying for and soft quota is set to hard quota - 10%. With 3 months of grace period that seems to work in my shop. 

What do you do in your shop ?

If a client books X TB from you and df shows X TB size, that would be the volume size in a UNIX example.

In other words, volume here means export (NFS) or share (SMB).

With Isilon, it's the hard limit  (excluding protection and snaps) on the directory quota, with "container" flag is set.

My question is, if your client wants X TB in the SLA,

do you set  hard to X and soft to  X-20%,

or do set soft to X and hard to X+20% ?

pay for actual use only

hard directory limits to keep user aware that capacity isn't bottomless

semi-aggressive notifications on advisory limits to the (paying) volume owner

no soft limits -- neither scenario (X, X+20% vs X-20%, X) is deemed consistent when looking at df

What  the original poster (rbracker) had in mind,

and I had posted here some time ago,

X soft limit and X+20% hard limit,

but with df reporting X as "size" would be great, in the sense that:

df usage 100% means: volume just full (X TB as booked in SLA)

df usage 110% means: overshooting, action required(!) within grace period (reduce usage or increase SLA)

df usage 120% means: hit hard limit at +20%, no more writes (easy to state in SLA)

Still hoping to convince the Isilon team...

-- Peter