Growing Thin Volumes

When a thinly provisioned volume needs additional capacity, the Oracle FS System automatically allocates the capacity at that point in time, which grows (or infills) the thin volume.

Note: The additional capacity that is allocated, however, might not be contiguous with the previous allocations.

Growth Increments

When the Oracle FS System infills a logical volume, the system divides the allocation into slices that are called growth increments. The system uses as many of the slices as are needed to fulfill the allocation.

For LUNs using regular QoS (single-tiered LUNs), the size of a growth increment is between 1 GB and 2 GB. For example, if the volume is 2 TB, the system uses a number of increments between 1024 and 2048 for the allocation. The exact number depends on the results of an algorithm that utilizes the following storage properties of the single-tiered volume:

The Storage Class of the drive groups on which the volume is placed
The RAID level of the volume
The number of drive groups across which the volume is striped, which is controlled by the Priority QoS property

Note: For LUNs using QoS Plus (auto-tiered LUNs), the size of a growth increment is 640 KB.

Growing LUNs

SAN LUNs reside in a single Storage Domain and utilize the capacity that is provided by the Storage Classes that you specify for the LUNs. For a thinly provisioned LUN, the following rules also apply:

The growth of a single-tiered LUN using regular QoS is confined to the drive groups that support the Storage Class that is assigned to the LUN.
The growth of an auto-tiered LUN can grow by utilizing the capacity in any of the storage tiers, independent of Storage Class.