Introduction
If you’ve been passed the unenviable task of bulk modification of multiple quotas on Isilon then you will know to do so manually is a tedious and incredibly time consuming process and most likely why you are reading this post. What you need is a process to follow, where most of the work is done for you by simply dumping out the currently configured quotas into a spreadsheet and auto-magically working out the adjustments.
This process originally came out of the fact there is confusion around the measurement of ‘data storage’ The difference between MB and MiB becomes ever more evident the larger file systems become. Have a read up on this site where the author provides a very handy calculator and makes a great point using an analogy of buying wood. Enough introduction, now to business.
The Process
Stage 1
Stage one is to dump out the live quota info from your Isilon cluster:
isi quota quotas list --verbose --format=csv
Stage 2
The next stage is to copy and paste the data into the following excel file:
The ‘Quota Conversion’ tab is fully protected and doesn’t need to be modified as it reads data from the csv import. The ‘Isilon CSV Output’ tab needs to be populated with the csv data from the isilon and the ‘Data Input’ tab is where the customer requested quota adjustments are made.
The information from the csv must be converted using ‘Text to Columns’ within Excel to ensure the conversion tab imports the data as required. Ensure you use comma delimited.
The Quota Conversion spreadsheet has some example data within to show the output and if you require to make modifications to the formulas the password “SECURE!” is used to unlock the sheets and workbook.
The following table describes what each column achieves:
Stage 3
The next stage is to write your commands for the changes which can be scripted in bash or run through in notepad++ etc.
Stage 4
The last stage is to re export the csv file and reload into the spreadsheet to ensure no mistakes have been made when implementing the quota changes.
Hope it saves someone else out there some significant time and effort.
