How to reclaim capacity tier license in ONTAP SELECT by removing aggregate

Applies to

• ONTAP Select
• ONTAP Select Deploy 9.4 to 9.7

Description

This KB describes how to remove storage from a single node ONTAP Select Instance and reclaim unused licensed capacity.

For ONTAP Select 9.8 and above, review How to remove attached disk from ONTAP Select Deploy Appliance

High level Action Plan:

1. Identify the disk to be removed and determine if the disk already belongs to an aggregate.
2. If the disk belongs to an aggregate the aggregate must be deleted.  First ensure the aggregate is emptied before deletion.
3. Remove the the hard disk within the Edit Settings dialog box in vSphere Web Client.
4. Remove the backing datastore from the ESX cluster to reclaim used licensed capacity.

Note: In some environments it might be problematic to remove the datastore if it is shared with other VMs or it contains VMDKs in use by other ONTAP Select aggregates. Therefore before removing a datastore plan where existing VMs will need to be moved ahead of time.  Be aware extra storage might be required to accomplish this task.

While this procedure will remove the VMDK and return that as useable space upon the datastore/storage pool and the license will reflect an available capacity that appears to be accurate, the total used capacity will continue to reflect the full amount.

This means that a user will most likely be unable to add the full amount of available license capacity back to the Select node.

For example: If there were a 50TB capacity tier license used to create a 15TB Select node and 5TB of that Select node were deleted and returned, while the available license capacity would reflect 40TB, the total used capacity would still reflect 15TB. This would restrict the amount that could be added at a later time to 35TB, rather than the expected 40TB.