Support provisioning of qtrees instead of volumes to improve Trident scalability

[arndt-netapp]

Requesting that Trident implement a capability to provision qtrees instead of flexible volumes (flexvols) for each new PVC. At the time of this RFE, ONTAP supports up to 1000 flexvols per node and 12,000 flexvols per cluster. In some environments, customers will have a desire to provision many small volumes with Trident, and will certainly run into the 1000 flexvols per node or 12,000 flexvols per cluster limit before they run into performance or capacity limits on a node or cluster. A qtree based implementation would assume that the user must configure Trident with a list of SVMs and pre-created flexvols on those SVMs that can be used for qtree based provisioning. Trident should then load balance the creation of new qtrees across those flexvols based on free capacity and the number of qtrees already created in each flexvol. Note that there are limits of 4,995 qtrees per flexvol and 100,000 qtrees per node.

[innergy]

Thanks for the feedback. Using qtrees is one possible approach for ONTAP, there are others worth considering. This will require careful design, because capabilities are lost when you move away from a full volume.

[nthawani]

We are large organization with thousands of qtrees presented to OSE w/Kubernetes. We are unable to implement Trident because of its limitation on qtree support. We would love to see qtree support in Trident.

[adkerr]

Tracked internally as [US2505]

[netapp-ci]

(Comment from NetApp CI):

(Comment from Andrew Kerr):

Tracked internally as [US2505]

[kaparora]

Do we have any status on this request? Is this being worked on ? Still under consideration?

[clintonk]

Hi, Kapil. Yes, we're working on the scalability question. Stay tuned.

[kaparora]

Hi Clinton,
Awesome work!
When is this getting released? Any tentative dates?
Kapil

[adkerr]

We plan to have a beta shortly and it will be included in the 17.10 release (so October release)