What are requirements for thin provisioning?

[Moha]

After reading some posts here and the ZFS page on the Wiki, here are my understanding of thin provisioning:

1. To have possibility to create thin-provisioned virtual machines, it's necessary to install Proxmox on the ground of ZFS.
2. For raising Proxmox on ZFS, it's mandatory to have at least two physical disks.

Am I right?

 

[Dunuin]

1. To have possibility to create thin-provisioned virtual machines, it's necessary to install Proxmox on the ground of ZFS.

No. LVM-Thin, Ceph (and I think btrfs) also support thin provisioning.

2. For raising Proxmox on ZFS, it's mandatory to have at least two physical disks.

No. ZFS will work with a single disk. If that makes sense for you is another thing. SSDs and HDDs are consumables that die sooner or later (just lost one SSD again last week). If you don't want to loose your data get redundancy. So its highly recommended to use atleast two disks so you can setup something like a raid1 for redundancy so you don't loose data when your disks fails. But its not mandatory. Also keep in mind that ZFS won't be able to repair corrupted data in case you don't got parity data. So with just a single disk there will be no bit rot protection.

 

[spirit]

only shared lvm don't support thin provisioning.
All others storages are doing thin provisionning by default.

 

[LnxBil]

All others storages are doing thin provisionning by default.

One remark: local thick-lvm does also not support provisioning if you've done it wrong :-

Please also keep in mind than you normally want thin-provisioning and discard, so that thin-provisioned space also gets reclaimed and will not fill up until it is thick. Those both terms are often used wrongly as analogous, but they are not.