This video talks about File System Quotas overview, configuration, user quotas/quota trees , and demo on Unity system.
Hello and welcome to the E MC unity video on file system quotas for this video, we will be going through a few topics including an overview on file system quotas. The configuration needed to use quotas followed lastly by a demonstration on setting up and using file system quotas in unisphere. The benefit of quotas is that they allow administrators to limit the amount of storage consumption for a given storage resource. In the case for unity file system, quotas have been implemented to allow storage admins to set the limits on the amount of disk space.
A particular user or specific directory can consume the two types of quotas available on unity are user quotas as well as quarter trees also known as tree quotas. Note that user quotas can also be set on specific quota trees as well for quotas limits, information is stored within quota records for each user quota and quarter tree as well as user quotas within quota trees for quota usage, two different quota policies are available. The policy can either be set to file size which calculates usage in one kilobyte increments and takes into account logical file sizes or by blocks which calculates usage in eight kilobyte increments and only takes into account actual block usage in the back end file size policy is recommended for Windows environments.
While blocks policy is recommended for UNIX or Linux environments, in terms of management, file system quotas can be configured via the unisphere, go unisphere cli or the rest API. Now we'll go over a high level illustration of how quotas work on unity systems. Once a file system is created, an admin can create quota limits including a soft limit. In this case, 20 gigabytes and a hard limit for this case, 25 gigabytes. The admin can define a grace period which is the amount of time this soft limit can be crossed before access is denied to the user or directory. At this point. In the illustration, the files that have been copied or moved to the file system are below the soft limit in overall usage.
Let's say some time later that the soft limit of 20 gigabytes is crossed. In this case, the storage administrator is notified of the event via a warning alert as sitting in the bottom left. The user of the file system is not aware of the limit being passed so it can continue to write files as before. At the same time, the specified grace period is invoked and starts counting down. This allows the admin time to determine whether to increase quota limits or take other actions as needed to control false system usage. Now, let's take the case where the false system quota usage is still below the hard limit.
But the grace period of one day has been passed for this case, the client has denied requests to copy or move more files into the file share. And the storage admin receives notification in the form of an error alert stating that the soft limit has been exceeded and the grace period has expired for this next scenario, we'll assume that the grace period hadn't been expired. But instead the hard limit has been reached from the many files being copied or moved. This case is similar to the previous where the client is no longer able to copy more files. In this case, the store Dimon receives an error alert stating that the hard limit has been reached and suggests to address the issue now that you know how quotas work.
Let's take a look at the prerequisites to using quotas before signing quotas. First, a Nasser must be created with either of both file protocols enabled. Then a file system can be configured which quotas can be created on for quota configuration. There are default quota settings that act as global settings for the file system. Then user quotas and qu trees can be configured with specified limits. Note that Nesta quota trees are not supported on this platform. Let's now get into a demonstration of using file system quotas within unisphere for this demo. I've pre configured a NAS server and a file system. In this case, an SNB file system called test FS has been created on top of a NAS server with SNB, an active directory enabled within the properties of the file system. You will see a tab called quota clicking on the tab brings us to the user quota page in the top right of the page.
We'll click on manage quota settings here, we can see the different quota policies we can choose for this demo. We'll keep file size for the quota policy and ensure user quotas are enforced so that the system keeps track of when users hit specified limits. We'll also set the soft limit to five gigabytes, the grace period to one day and the hard limit to seven gigabytes after clicking. OK. Every user that connects to this file system will be subject to the quota limits that we just set without the need of additional administration. Let's now create a custom user quota for one of our windows users in the create user quota wizard. We'll click on the add button here. We can see the host type of windows name is selected. Other options are UNIX name and UNIX ID for UNIX environments.
The domain we will be using is called PRO CC and the name of the user is sample clicking add user will check if it is a valid user and the proceed if it's successful. We can add additional users if needed but we'll move on on the next page. We will set the soft limit and hard limit for the user we specified at two gigabytes and five gigabytes respectively. Note that the grace period set in quota settings is default for all user quotas created on the root of the file system. After creating the new user quota, let's connect to the file system from a WINDOWS host here, we can see the file system share which maps the test fs that we modified earlier.
Let's copy a file of size three gigabytes to the file system. Now that's done. Let's see how the status of our quota has changed in unisphere by clicking refresh here. We can see that the status has changed to exceeded soft limit for our user quota. In this case, an alert was generated for the user, but the user may continue to write data as needed. Note that if the administrator wants to find out which quote corresponds with which Windows user, they can use the find by user name function to look up the user. Let's now try to copy an additional three gigabytes to the file system to see what happens when the hard limit is reached. Since the copy would have pushed the file system over the hard limit for this user.
The file system displays an error message saying the quarter limit has been reached and the same message would have been seen if the grace period of one day has been exceeded even without reaching the hard limit. Let's now create a quarter tree and unisphere by clicking quarter tree in the left hand pane, click in the add button. We are showing the create quarter tree wizard. In the first step, we will specify a new path which we call test path. Demo note that the directory does not have to exist prior to creating a new quarter tree. On the next step, we'll specify the hard and soft limit for this quarter tree to be one gigabytes and two gigabytes just for demo purposes.
After checking the settings on the summary page, we'll click finish in the properties of the newly created quarter tree. We can see the settings we just created along with the grace period field. This grace period is specific to this quarter tree on the user quotas tab, let's enable enforce user quotas and set soft and hard limits. But again, this is specific to this quarter tree on our windows host. We can see a new directory called test path demo. In our file system, let's copy a 1.5 gigabyte file back in unisphere. We could see that the user quota was automatically created for our user for this quarter tree and that the soft limit has been exceeded at the quarter tree level.
We can see the overall usage has increased by 1.5 gigabytes as well. And back on the system court report, we can see that the usage of our user has increased even though files were copied to a subdirectory ensuring that users are subject to all quotas. This concludes this demonstration for additional information on file system quotas and related settings. Please see the unity file system white paper on E MC online support and check out the E MC info hub for other unity documentation and links.
