ONTAP Volume Options

Volume create options for both NFS and iSCSI:

  • size - the size of the volume, defaults to 1 GiB
  • spaceReserve - thin or thick provision the volume, defaults to thin. Valid values are none (thin provisioned) and volume (thick provisioned).
  • snapshotPolicy - this will set the snapshot policy to the desired value. The default is none, meaning no snapshots will automatically be created for the volume. Unless modified by your storage administrator, a policy named “default” exists on all ONTAP systems which creates and retains six hourly, two daily, and two weekly snapshots. The data preserved in a snapshot can be recovered by browsing to the .snapshot directory in any directory in the volume.
  • snapshotReserve - this will set the snapshot reserve to the desired percentage. The default is no value, meaning ONTAP will select the snapshotReserve (usually 5%) if you have selected a snapshotPolicy, or 0% if the snapshotPolicy is none. The default snapshotReserve value may be set in the config file for all ONTAP backends, and it may be used as a volume creation option for all ONTAP backends except ontap-nas-economy.
  • splitOnClone - when cloning a volume, this will cause ONTAP to immediately split the clone from its parent. The default is false. Some use cases for cloning volumes are best served by splitting the clone from its parent immediately upon creation, since there is unlikely to be any opportunity for storage efficiencies. For example, cloning an empty database can offer large time savings but little storage savings, so it’s best to split the clone immediately.
  • encryption - this will enable NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE) on the new volume, defaults to false. NVE must be licensed and enabled on the cluster to use this option.
  • tieringPolicy - sets the tiering policy to be used for the volume. This decides whether data is moved to the cloud tier when it becomes inactive (cold).

NFS has additional options that aren’t relevant when using iSCSI:

  • unixPermissions - this controls the permission set for the volume itself. By default the permissions will be set to ---rwxr-xr-x, or in numerical notation 0755, and root will be the owner. Either the text or numerical format will work.
  • snapshotDir - setting this to true will make the .snapshot directory visible to clients accessing the volume. The default value is false, meaning that access to snapshot data is disabled by default. Some images, for example the official MySQL image, don’t function as expected when the .snapshot directory is visible.
  • exportPolicy - sets the export policy to be used for the volume. The default is default.
  • securityStyle - sets the security style to be used for access to the volume. The default is unix. Valid values are unix and mixed.

iSCSI has an additional option that isn’t relevant when using NFS:

  • fileSystemType - sets the file system used to format iSCSI volumes. The default is ext4. Valid values are ext3, ext4, and xfs.
  • spaceAllocation - setting this to false will turn off the LUN’s space-allocation feature. The default value is true, meaning ONTAP notifies the host when the volume has run out of space and the LUN in the volume cannot accept writes. This option also enables ONTAP to reclaim space automatically when your host deletes data.

Using these options during the docker volume create operation is super simple, just provide the option and the value using the -o operator during the CLI operation. These override any equivalent values from the JSON configuration file.

# create a 10GiB volume
docker volume create -d netapp --name demo -o size=10G -o encryption=true

# create a 100GiB volume with snapshots
docker volume create -d netapp --name demo -o size=100G -o snapshotPolicy=default -o snapshotReserve=10

# create a volume which has the setUID bit enabled
docker volume create -d netapp --name demo -o unixPermissions=4755

The minimum volume size is 20MiB.

If the snapshot reserve is not specified and the snapshot policy is ‘none’, Trident will use a snapshot reserve of 0%.

# create a volume with no snapshot policy and no snapshot reserve
docker volume create -d netapp --name my_vol --opt snapshotPolicy=none

# create a volume with no snapshot policy and a custom snapshot reserve of 10%
docker volume create -d netapp --name my_vol --opt snapshotPolicy=none --opt snapshotReserve=10

# create a volume with a snapshot policy and a custom snapshot reserve of 10%
docker volume create -d netapp --name my_vol --opt snapshotPolicy=myPolicy --opt snapshotReserve=10

# create a volume with a snapshot policy, and accept ONTAP's default snapshot reserve (usually 5%)
docker volume create -d netapp --name my_vol --opt snapshotPolicy=myPolicy