About creating and maintaining file systems

An Access Appliance environment consists of multiple nodes that can access and update files in the same Veritas file system at the same time. Many file systems can be supported at the same time. You create file systems on groups of disks called storage pools.

File systems consist of both metadata and file system data. Metadata contains information such as the last modification date, creation time, permissions, and so on. The total amount of the space that is required for the metadata depends on the number of files in the file system. A file system with many small files requires more space to store metadata. A file system with fewer larger files requires less space for handling the metadata.

When you create a file system, you need to set aside some space for handling the metadata. The space that is required is generally proportional to the size of the file system. For this reason, after you create the file system, a small portion of the space appears to be used. The space that is set aside to handle metadata may increase or decrease as needed. For example, a file system on a 1-GB volume takes approximately 35 MB (about 3%) initially to store metadata. In contrast, a file system of 10 MB requires approximately 3.3 MB (30%) initially for storing the metadata.

Veritas recommends that you create a maximum of 50 file systems in a cluster.

File systems can be increased or decreased in size. SmartTier functionality is also provided at the file system level.

For a newly created file, the file system name can have a maximum of 25 characters. If you create a space-optimized or full-sized rollback for a specified file system, then the file system name can have a maximum of 19 characters because additional strings are added to its volume name and a volume name can have a maximum of 31 characters.