[SOLVED] Max number of subfolders reached in .chunks/ folder

[Taledo]

Hey all,

I'm trying to use an old Dell VNXE Storage as a sync target for cold storage out of site backups copy.

The datastore creation fails with an IO Output error. As it turns out, it seems I cannot create more than 65533 folders :

root@definitelynotwhereiam-pbs2:/vnxe/.chunks# mkdir foo
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘foo’: Input/output error
root@definitelynotwhereiam-pbs2:/vnxe/.chunks# ls -lah | wc -l
65536

My fstab is as follow :

vnxe_ip:/backups /vnxe nfs defaults,proto=tcp,nfsvers=3 0 0

This seems to be a hard limit set by Dell for some obscure reasons : https://www.dell.com/community/VNX/...arent-directory-hard-limit-65533/td-p/6893847

Are there any workarounds that would allow me to create a datastore on this old piece of equipment? It's still 14Tb of available disk space, and I'd rather use it that way than bin it.

Cheers

 

[dcsapak]

no, the way the chunk folder is organized is pretty deeply integrated and there is no way to change it

 

[Taledo]

Alright, well, that's a shame. Guess I'll have to find another use for the VNXE.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[mow]

Is file size limited? Could you create a usable filesystem with a loop mount?

 

[Taledo]

As I understand it, there's no way to create more than 65535 subfolders in a folder. File size doesn't matter.

As for the loop mount, I've honestly got no idea, but seeing as how I get an IO error when manually creating a folder, I do not think the VNXE would allow it.

 

[mow]

As I understand it, there's no way to create more than 65535 subfolders in a folder. File size doesn't matter.
As for the loop mount, I've honestly got no idea, but seeing as how I get an IO error when manually creating a folder, I do not think the VNXE would allow it.

as long as it allows to create a file several TB in size that you create a filesystem in, and it is reliably accessible so that filesystem doesn't get corrupted, vnxe is literally out of the loop.