To migrate data to a local HDP pool, that local HDP pool must be thickly provisioned, even if the external LUs are not. For example, for a remote HDP pool with six 10 TiB pool volumes and twenty 8 TiB DP-Vols, on migrating the data to local storage, the local HDP pool needs to provide 160 TiB of pool volumes or parity groups, instead of the 60 TiB that were present on the remote storage.
If the remote HDP pool contains multiple spans, it is possible to mitigate this inefficiency as follows:
- Identify the span with the largest amount of free space - that is, the largest difference (in TiB) between the total capacity of the filesystems and the capacity of the span.
- If you have recently deleted filesystems from the span and you are confident that you will not need to undelete them, run the filesystem-recycle --all-filesystems command against the span.
- Migrate this span using Hitachi Storage Administrator Migrator functionality. Wait for migration to complete.
- When migration is complete, the free space on the local HDP pool falls by the capacity of the span (rather than just the capacity of the filesystems on it).
- Run the span-unmap-vacated-chunks --unused-chunks command against the span. This command launches a background process that gives unused space back to the local HDP pool. Within a few minutes, the free space on the local HDP pool starts to rise slowly as the storage zero-initializes the HDP pages that the server has returned to the HDP pool. It keeps rising as the storage continues to zero-initialize HDP pages, even after the unmapping process logs an event on the Admin Service to say that it has finished. To reduce the performance impact on the system, use the span-throttle-unmapping command. You can check the free space on the HDP pool using the span-list --sds command, but the server has no way to monitor or manage the zero-initialization process.
- As soon as the local HDP pool has space, migrate the second span, selected in the same way as before.
- Continue with this process until all spans are migrated.