Quota management

This page describes how to manage quotas to alert or restrict usage of the WekaFS filesystem.

Overview

There are several levels on the Weka system where capacity usage can be restricted.

1. On an organization level: Set a different organization to manage its own filesystems, where quotas for an organization can be set, as described in the organization's usage and quota management section.

2. On a filesystem level: Set a different filesystem per department/project.

3. On a directory level: Set a different quota per project directory (useful when users are part of several projects) or per user home directory.

Directory quotas

The organization admin can set a quota on a directory. Setting a quota will start the process of counting the current directory usage. Until this process is done, the quota will not be taken into account (for empty directories, this process is instantly done).

Note: Currently, a mount point to the relevant filesystem is required to set a quota on a directory, and the quota set command should not be interrupted until the quota accounting is over.

The organization admin sets quotas to inform/restrict users from using too much of the filesystem capacity. For that, only data in the user's control is considered. Hence, the quota doesn't count the overhead of the protection bits and snapshots. It does take into account data and metadata of files in the directory, regardless if tiered or not.

Working with quotas

When working with quotas, consider the following:

• To set a quota, the relevant filesystem must be mounted on the host where the set quota command is to be run.

• When setting a quota, you should go through a new mount-point. This means that if you are using a host that has mounts from Weka versions before 3.10, first unmount all relevant mount point and then mount them again.

• Quotas can be set within nested directories (up to 4 levels of nested quotas are supported) and over-provisioned under the same directory quota tree. E.g., /home can have a quota of 1TiB, and each user directory under it can have a quota of 10GiB, while there are 200 users.

• Moving files (or directories) between two directories with quotas, into a directory with a quota, or outside a directory with a quota is not supported. The WekaFS filesystem returns EXDEV in such a case, which is usually converted by the operating system to copy and delete but is OS-dependent.

• Quotas and hardlinks:

  • An existing hardlink is not counted as part of the quota.

  • Once a directory has a quota, it is not allowed to create a hardlink to files residing under directories with different (or without) directory quotas.

• Restoring a filesystem from a snapshot turns the quotas back to the configuration at the time of the snapshot.

• Creating a new filesystem from a snap-2-obj does not preserve the original quotas.

• When working with enforcing quotas along with a writecache mount-mode, similarly to other POSIX solutions, getting above the quota might not sync all the cache writes to the backend servers. Use sync, syncfs, or fsync to commit the cached changes to the system (or fail due to exceeding the quota).

Integration with the df utility

When a hard quota is set on a directory, running the df utility will consider the hard quota as the total capacity of the directory and provide the use% relative to the quota. This can help users understand their usage and how close they are to the hard quota.

Note: The df utility behavior with quotas is currently global to the Weka system.

To change the global behavior, contact the Weka Support Team.

Manage quotas using the CLI

Set directory quotas/default quotas

Command: weka fs quota set / weka fs quota set-default

Use the following commands to set a directory quota:

weka fs quota set <path> [--soft soft] [--hard hard] [--grace grace] [--owner owner]

It is also possible to set a default quota on a directory. It does not account for this directory (or existing child directories) but will automatically set the quota on new directories created directly under it. Use the following command to set a default quota of a directory:

weka fs quota set-default <path> [--soft soft] [--hard hard] [--grace grace] [--owner owner]

Parameters

Name	Type	Value	Limitations	Mandatory	Default
path	String	Path to the directory to set the quota on.	The relevant filesystem must be mounted when setting the quota.	Yes	​
soft	Number	Soft quota limit; Exceeding this number will be shown as exceeded quota but will not be enforced until the grace period is over.	Capacity in decimal or binary units, e.g.: 1GB, 1TB, 1GiB, 1TiB, unlimited	No	unlimited
hard	Number	Hard quota limit; Exceeding this number will not allow any more writes before clearing some space in the directory.	Capacity in decimal or binary units, e.g.: 1GB, 1TB, 1GiB, 1TiB, unlimited	No	unlimited
grace	Number	Specify the grace period before the soft limit is treated as a hard limit.	Format: 1d, 1w, unlimited	No	unlimited
owner	String	An opaque string identifying the directory owner (can be a name, email, slack ID, etc.) This owner will be shown in the quota report and can be notified upon exceeding the quota.	Up to 48 characters.	No

Note: To set advisory-only quotas, use a soft quota limit without setting a grace period.

Note: When both hard and soft quotas exist, setting the value of one of them to 0 will clear this quota.

List directory quotas/default quotas

Command: weka fs quota list / weka fs quota list-default

Use the following command to list the directory quotas (by default, only exceeding quotas are listed) :

weka fs quota list [fs-name] [--snap-name snap-name] [--path path] [--under under] [--over over] [--quick] [--all]

Parameters

Name	Type	Value	Limitations	Mandatory	Default
fs-name	String	Shows quota report only on the specified filesystem.	A valid wekafs filesystem name.	No	All filesystems
snap-name	String	Shows the quota report from the time of the snapshot.	Must be a valid snapshot name and be given along with the corresponding fs-name.	No
path	String	Path to a directory. Shows quota report only on the specified directory.	The relevant filesystem must be mounted in the host running the query.	No
under	String	A path to a directory under a wekafs mount.	The relevant filesystem must be mounted in the host running the query.	No
over	Number	Shows only quotas over this percentage of usage	0-100	No
quick	Boolean	Do not resolve inode to a path (provides quicker result if the report contains many entries).		No	False
all	Boolean	Shows all the quotas, not just the exceeding ones.		No	False

Use the following command to list the directory default quotas:

weka fs quota list-default [fs-name] [--snap-name snap-name] [--path path]

Parameters

Name	Type	Value	Limitations	Mandatory	Default
fs-name	String	Shows the default quotas of the specified filesystem only.	A valid wekafs filesystem name.	No	All filesystems
snap-name	String	Shows the default quotas from the time of the snapshot.	Must be a valid snapshot name and be given along with the corresponding fs-name.	No
path	String	Path to a directory. Shows the default quotas report only on the specified directory.	The relevant filesystem must be mounted in the host running the query.	No

Unsetting directory quotas/default quotas

Command: weka fs quota unset / weka fs quota unset-default

Use the following commands to unset a directory quota:

weka fs quota unset <path>

Use the following command to unset a default quota of a directory:

weka fs quota unset-default <path>

Parameters

Name	Type	Value	Limitations	Mandatory	Default
path	String	Path to the directory to set the quota on	The relevant filesystem must be mounted when setting the quota	Yes	​