Dell PowerFlex 4.5.x Administration Guide

Adding volumes to a resource group

Use this procedure to create new volumes or add existing volumes to a resource group.

1. On the Resource Groups page, click Add Resources and choose Add Volumes.
2. To add existing volumes to a compute-only or hyperconverged resource group, select Add Existing Volumes and follow these steps:
   1. Click Select Volumes to choose the volumes you want to add.
   2. Enter a volume or datastore name search string in the Search Text box.
   3. Optionally, apply additional search criteria by specifying values for the Size, Type, Compression, and Storage filters.
   4. Click Search.
      PowerFlex Manager updates the results to show only those volumes that satisfy the search criteria. If the search returns more than 50 volumes, refine the search criteria to return only 50 volumes.
   5. Click the checkbox for each volume you want to add.
   6. Click the >> button to select the volumes.

      To remove a selected volume, click the checkbox for the volume to remove and click the << button.

   7. When you are ready to add the selected volumes, click Add.
   8. After you have selected the volumes that you want to add, define a template for datastore names in the Datastore Name Template field and click Next.
      The template must include a variable that allows PowerFlex Manager to produce a unique datastore name.
3. To create new volumes for a storage-only or hyperconverged resource group, select Create New Volumes and follow these steps:

   If you want to create a single volume with a specified name:

   1. Click + Add Volume to add a new volume section.

      PowerFlex Manager adds a new volume section to the Add Volume wizard.

   2. In the Volume Name field, select Specify Name.
   3. In the New Volume Name field, type the volume name.
   4. In the Datastore Name field, select Create New Datastore to create a new datastore, or select a datastore.
   5. In the New Datastore Name field, type the name for the datastore.
   6. In the Storage Pool drop-down, choose the storage pool where the volume will reside.
   7. Select the Enable Compression check box to take advantage of the PowerFlex NVDIMM compression feature.
   8. In the Volume Size (GB) field, select the size in GB. The minimum size is 8 GB and the value you specify must be divisible by eight.
   9. In the Volume Type field, select thick or thin.

      A thick volume provides a larger amount of storage in advance, whereas a thin volume provides on-demand storage and faster setup and startup times.

      If you enable compression on a hyperconverged or storage-only resource group with the granularity of the storage pool set to fine, the only option for Volume Type is thin. This is the case regardless of whether you deploy a compressed or non-compressed volume.

   If you want to create multiple volumes that share a common naming pattern:

   1. Click + Add Volume to add a new volume section.

      PowerFlex Manager adds a new volume section to the Add Volume wizard.

   2. In the Volume Name field, select Auto Generate Name.
   3. In the Volume Name Template field, define the template for volume names.
      The template must include a variable that allows PowerFlex Manager to produce a unique volume name.
   4. In the How Many Volumes field, select the number of volumes you want to create.

      The number must not be greater than 50.

   5. In the Datastore Name Template field, define a template for datastore names.
      The template must include a variable that allows PowerFlex Manager to produce a unique datastore name.
   6. In the Storage Pool drop-down, choose the storage pool where the volume will reside.
   7. Select the Enable Compression check box to take advantage of the PowerFlex NVDIMM compression feature.
   8. In the Volume Size (GB) field, select the size in GB. The minimum size is 8 GB and the value you specify must be divisible by eight.
   9. In the Volume Type field, select thick or thin.

      A thick volume provides a larger amount of storage in advance, whereas a thin volume provides on-demand storage and faster setup and startup times.

      If you enable compression on a hyperconverged or storage-only resource group with the granularity of the storage pool set to fine, the only option for Volume Type is thin. This is the case regardless of whether you deploy a compressed or non-compressed volume.

4. Optionally, click Add volume again to add another volume section. Then, provide the required information for that section.
5. Click Next once you have included information about all of the volumes you want to add.
6. On the Summary screen, review the volume details to be sure that everything looks correct.

   If you added existing volumes, you can click View Volumes to review the list of volumes previously selected.

7. Click Finish.

   The resource group moves to the In Progress state and the new volume icons appear on the Resource Group Details page. You may see multiple volume components while the add operation is still in progress. One the operation is complete, you will see just one volume component with the count updated.

   After the deployment completes successfully, you can click View Volumes in the Storage list on the Resource Group Details page to search for volumes that are part of the resource group.

   The PowerFlex user interface shows the new volumes under the storage pool. For a storage-only resource group, the volumes are created, but not mapped. For a compute-only or hyperconverged resource group, the volumes are mapped to SDCs. In the vSphere client, you can see the volumes in the storage section and also see the hosts that are mapped to the volumes, once the mappings are in place.