Thin provisioning on NFS

[Jason2312312]

Who can help me out, I don't remember thin provisioning being so difficult to set up on ESX...

What am I missing here?




I am currently running sdelete -z, which only seems to increase the space right now (it was 940GB free), maybe this helps but I don't have high hopes. There must be something fundamental I am missing which causes it to not work.


Any insight is highly appreciated.

 

[waltar]

There's nothing missed as qcow2 is doing that automatically for you:
l -h /nfs-path/images/148/vm-148-disk-0.qcow2
-rw-r----- 1 root root 61G Oct 1 18:00 148/vm-148-disk-0.qcow2
du -sh /nfs-path/images/148/vm-148-disk-0.qcow2
5.5G 148/vm-148-disk-0.qcow2

 

[Jason2312312]

root@delta-one:~# du -sh /mnt/pve/XXX_TEMP2/images/103
1001G /mnt/pve/AI-DS02_TEMP2/images/103

root@delta-one:~# ls -lh /mnt/pve/XXX_TEMP2/images/103
total 1001G
-rwxrwxrwx 1 1024 users 1001G Oct 1 19:51 vm-103-disk-0.qcow2

But this just confirms what Synology shows: 1TB on disk size as well.

 

[BobhWasatch]

Do you trim inside the VM?

 

[waltar]

Your nfs storage consists of any kind of ssd's ?
Which filesystem is on your synology for this nfs share ?

 

[Jason2312312]

Do you trim inside the VM?

Yep, I use the Windows disk optimization utility and also used sDelete to mark empty space with zeroes.

Your nfs storage consists of any kind of ssd's ?
Which filesystem is on your synology for this nfs share ?

Nope, just HDD Raid 1, Btrfs over NFS 4.1.

 

[waltar]

Usage on ssd's may clear the bahavior but are not used here.
In my example we use xfs, vm's are qcow2, lxc are raw files and I assume your btrfs may not do different in qcow2 allocation ...
Do you have the possibility to test your qcow2 allocation with nfs share on xfs of another pc ?
Otherwise no further idea yet, sorry.

 

[Jason2312312]

Usage on ssd's may clear the bahavior but are not used here.
In my example we use xfs, vm's are qcow2, lxc are raw files and I assume your btrfs may not do different in qcow2 allocation ...
Do you have the possibility to test your qcow2 allocation with nfs share on xfs of another pc ?
Otherwise no further idea yet, sorry.

I see, I don't have anything to try that out with. I did create a testdisk on local LVM, but not sure how to see actual disk space used per virtual disk on that storage. After moving it to NFS it takes the full 5GB of 1GB used, even after trimming and writing zeroes.
I do read that NFS 4.2 might help, which Synology does not support (yet). I might try ISCSI but that doesn't work with multiple hosts in a cluster, not a problem for me right now though.

I would like to figure out what the exact problem is, the documentation really lacks for newcomers like me.

 

[waltar]

Even after further vm148 running, refink cp and cp over nfs to backup source (as nfs dr source) it still lists 61G with ls -h and 6G with du -h now.
Maybe it depends on the os inside your vm what it is doing with your qcow2 file ...