Creating LUNs on NetApp Filers

You can create LUNs (or alter existing LUNs) on a NetApp filer using the lun command.  Specifically, LUNs are created using the lun create command along with a boatload of switches.  Here's an example of a complete command:

lun create -s (size) -t (type) (LUN path)

The -s switch designates the size of the LUN and uses the format of (size)(unit), so 40g would create a 40GB LUN and 20m would create a 20MB LUN.  LUN type will generally be linux on a Linux box or windows on a Windows box using MBR, but here are a few others that are common:

windows - Creates a Windows partition using a Master Boot Record, or MBR.

windows_gpt - Creates a Windows partition using a GUID Partition Table, or GPT.

vmware - Creates a VMware partition.

xen - Creates a Citrix Xen partition.

hyper_v - Creates a Microsoft Hyper-V partition.

 

Finally, the LUN Path is the location of the volume.

For example, let's assume you want to create a 40MB LUN for a Linux system located in /vol/test_1a/lun40.  You might scoff at such a small LUN size, but I find it handy to make a bunch of small LUNs of varying sizes (e.g. 10MB, 20MB, 30MB, 40MB, etc) and serve one from each controller whenever I stand up a new storage system.  This helps me quickly identify path isues such as bad fiber and defective HBAs because I can quickly see which LUNs aren't visible as I scan the HBAs on each host.  The command to create this LUN from a Linux host is as follows:

lun create -s 40m -t linux /vol/test_1a/lun40

 

If you want to get a bit fancier, you can see the whole list of lun command switches here:

http://backdrift.org/man/netapp/man1/na_lun.1.html