f I could mount unlimited NFS mounts on ESX it would be good for me, but
there is a 64 nfs datastore limit.
Right now if I copy a big file it can take several minutes. I already tried
having one VM per zfs file system, and snapshot & clone works great, as long
as I stay below 64 NFS mounts.
Note that VMWARE doesn't support NFS v4 or else doing something like
mypool/xxx/m1
mypool/xxx/m2
etc.
would work, but on the ESX if I mount xxx I just see empty directories for
m1 and m2 as it only works with NFS v3 which does not support automatic
cross mounts.
NetApp has the ability to instantly clone single files and that would also
solve our problem if its somewhere in ZFS road-map (unless the issues we
have above can be resolved)
Thanks,
-- Schachar
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:42 PM, David Magda <dma...@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
> On Wed, April 21, 2010 02:41, Schachar Levin wrote:
> > Hi,
> > We are currently using NetApp file clone option to clone multiple VMs on
> > our FS.
> >
> > ZFS dedup feature is great storage space wise but when we need to clone
> > allot of VMs it just takes allot of time.
> >
> > Is there a way (or a planned way) to clone a file without going through
> > the process of actually copying the blocks, but just duplicating its meta
> > data like NetApp does?
>
> You mean like the ZFS "clone" command?
>
> zfs clone [-p] [-o property=value] ... snapshot filesystem|volume
>
> From zfs(1M):
> [...]
> Clones
> A clone is a writable volume or file system whose initial
> contents are the same as another dataset. As with snapshots,
> creating a clone is nearly instantaneous, and initially con-
> sumes no additional space.
>
> Clones can only be created from a snapshot. When a snapshot
> is cloned, it creates an implicit dependency between the
> parent and child. Even though the clone is created somewhere
> else in the dataset hierarchy, the original snapshot cannot
> be destroyed as long as a clone exists. The origin property
> exposes this dependency, and the destroy command lists any
> such dependencies, if they exist.
> [...]
>
> So you'd have something like the following:
>
> # zfs create /mypool/machine00
> [ Create VMDK stuff. ]
> # zfs snapshot /mypool/machin...@template
> # for i in 01 02 03 04 05 \
> do \
> zfs mypool/machin...@template mypool/machine${i} \
> done
> #
>
> This should work for both regular file systems (shared via NFS) and zvols
> (via iSCSI); at $WORK we've used the latter to clone LDoms vdisks.
>
>
>
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