13.1 Understanding NSS Volumes

NSS volumes are logical storage media that acquire space from pools of storage. When you create a logical volume, you can either assign it a fixed amount of space or allow it to expand to the pool size. To grow a volume, you might need to add new segments to grow the pool first, up to the maximum pool size of 8 TB. On NetWare®, you can also use Novell Distributed File Services Move and Split functions to relocate the volume (or part of a volume) to a new pool on the same or different server in the same tree.

If a pool contains multiple volumes, the cumulative administrative maximum sizes of all volumes can exceed the pool size, using the overbooking feature, although real total size is bound by physical limitations. Because space is allocated to volumes as needed, a volume might not reach its quota. As the overbooked volumes consume the available physical space, you need to add more disk space to the pool to accommodate the growth, or consider moving or splitting volumes to move data to other pools.

For example, suppose you have an 800 MB storage pool with eight volumes set at 100 MB each. The administrative size equals the physical limits. To overbook the pool, you can add volumes, set one or more of the volumes to expand to the pool size, or increase the size of existing volumes, with the understanding that these are administrative maximum sizes, not physical sizes.

NSS recognizes DOS, Macintosh, UNIX, and Long name spaces. Volume names, directory names, and file names in NSS are case insensitive. This differs from Linux traditional file systems, which are case sensitive. For information, see Section 13.17, Mounting an NSS Volume on Linux to Support Case Insensitive File Names (Linux).

After you create NSS pools, use the iManager Storage plug-in to configure NSS storage volumes. For information about iManager, see the Novell iManager 2.5 Administration Guide .

You can also use the console-based NSS Management Utility to configure and manage NSS volumes. For information, see Section 3.2, NSS Management Utility (NSSMU).