[lvm-devel] snapshot in shared disk environment
Jun'ichi Nomura
j-nomura at ce.jp.nec.com
Tue Apr 5 10:23:20 UTC 2011
Hi,
Is it possible or is there on-going work to use snapshot in shared disk
environment?
In virtualization context, snapshotting is useful for quickly
creating a guest image from a template disk image.
(Fast creation and space efficiency with a cost of runtime performance)
LVM snapshot can be used for such a purpose, but there is a problem
if we are in shared disk environment:
a) Clustered snapshot is not yet supported.
b) Origin and snapshots are activated/deactivated as a whole set.
We can't individually activate/deactivate different snapshots on
different nodes.
a) might be ok.
A snapshot is accessed on a host at a time, not simultaneously on multiple
hosts. Also the origin is read-only.
So snapshot itself need not be cluster aware, I think.
If there are thousands of nodes sharing the disk, but only one of them
accesses the snapshot, clustered snapshot seems overkill.
I wonder whether we could relax the restriction in b) and allow individual
activation of snapshots.
Then, we can use snapshots in shared disk environment without clustered
snapshot support?
Thanks,
--
Jun'ichi Nomura, NEC Corporation
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