I have an aggregate with a 150 GB Flexible volume with a 3 TB capacity and a growth increment of 10 GB. If I want to Copy 1.5 TB of data to the volume, it tells me there is not enough disk space. Doesn't the flexible volume grow to accomodate the data dynamically, or will I have to manually assign more storage capacity to the flex volume?
edit: This is an iSCSi LUN, and the volume is an RDM (raw device mapping). The host is a Windows Server VM, and the LUN will be partitioned as NTFS.
Autogrow is not instant- it recognizes a threshold, and then as a background process, expands the volume by the amount you've specified. It was designed to avoid midnight space increase calls for normal growth that happened to trigger an alarm off business hours, but not be something that allows you to write past the end of the volume.
That said, since this is a LUN, the size presented to the client (in this case, a Windows VM) will not change dynamically. Autogrow only affects volumes, and volumes contain LUNs. I suspect the reason your large write failed was that even though you have plenty of space in the volume, the LUN's size doesn't change until you change it.
What you sound like you need to do is turn on thin provisioning for your LUN, and resize it to be at least 1.65TB. It will still only take up the current 150GB, and if you write over that amount to it, the volume will start to auto-grow.
