Is it possible to limit a drive to store only specific folders and not other pool data?

[banderon]

I have a 100TB pool with HDDs mounted as `D:\`. I recently added a 1TB SSD, and I would like to set it to store my virtual machines (located in `D:\VMs`). I set a placement rule to store the VMs folder (which needs fast access) only on the SSD drive, but I can't figure out how to set the SSD drive to store only the VMs folder (and nothing else).

Is there a way to limit a drive to only store specific folders?

 

EDIT:

I realized I'd only tried to get this to work with folder rules, not pattern-based rules. So I'm trying the following two rules:

/VMS/* -> only SSD drive
/* -> all drives except SSD, checked "When a drive is added to the pool, files matching this rule should be placed on the drive."

Thoughts on whether that'll work as I expect?

[banderon]

The rules in my edit to the initial post did not work. I noticed that nothing was being moved to the SSD, so I tried pausing the service and manually moving the data to the SSD. I then let DP recheck/rebalance overnight. By morning, the data I'd moved to the SSD had been moved out of the SSD and back to the HDDs. Clearly something is off with my rules.

I've moved the 1TB drive to be used as an SSD cache named `PooledCache01`, and have added a 4TB drive `PooledSSD01` that I'd like to use for the VMs. The total size of the VMs folder is currently ~1TB so it would only take ~25% of the 4TB drive, so free space is not the issue.

Any advice would be welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

[Shane]

I think un-ticking "Balancing -> Settings -> File placement rules respect real-time file placement limits set by the balancing plug-ins." is what's needed? You want the VMs to be sorted into the 4TB SSD by the File placement rules more than you want them to be cached into and emptied out of the 1TB SSD by the SSD Optimizer plug-in, and perhaps without that un-ticking the SSD Optimizer might be ignoring the File placement rules when it's emptying the "SSD" disk into the "Archive" disks?

[banderon]

My concern with that was whether that would mean that the balancing plug-ins would be ignored entirely for any folder that's affected by a rule (which would be everything due to the 2nd placement rule).

Would the scanner and SSD optimizer plugins still do what they should, considering the entire pool (minus the SSD) is in a placement rule?

[Shane]

The scanner plugin should since "Unless the drive is being emptied" is still ticked. The optimizer plugin I'm unsure of.

[banderon]

Thanks for thinking about this, but it doesn't really sound like there's a way to make this work cleanly for now. I'm going to make the two SSDs into their own pool with their own drive letter. Having multiple mounted pools isn't as tidy as I'd like, but it'll have to do.