Snapshots on the bin

Adventures in ZFS: Deletion of a Recursive Snapshot Set

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Quite often I will find it necessary to create a recursive snapshot over a large number of ZFS file systems. In this case, I find that frequently have little long term need for them, and need a quick and easy way of disposing of the snapshots created without spending large amounts of time manually deleting all of the snapshots.

Creating Some Snapshots

Here we will create some test snapshots. Make sure you do this on a test system, in a throw away area, this way if something is mistyped it doesn’t cause any problems.

Adventures in ZFS: Time Slider is not Expiring Snapshots on Imported Zpools

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago someone contacted me with an interesting issue with regards to the ZFS automatic snapshots, facilitatedby the time slider service.

The Situation

OpenSolaris machine with zpool exported. Time slider was working prior to export.
Solaris 11 Express fresh install with zpool imported.

The Symptoms

Basically the core of the issue was that the zpool was from an OpenSolaris machine, in lieu of doing an upgrade from OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 Express, the zpool was exported and imported into a machine which was already running Solaris 11 Express. Upon the import new snapshots were being created by the time slider service however old ones were not being expired. You can still manually delete snapshots.

Linux-KVM: Managing Disk Images

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Disk images have long been the traditional form of storage for virtualized environments, they are essentially containers in the form of a file on the host’s file system. These files can be either fully allocated or sparsely allocated at time of disk creation, a fully allocated 20GB disk image will take up 20GB of storage on the host file system, a sparsely allocated 20GB disk image will only take up as much storage on the host file system as has actually been written inside of the disk, so if you have a newly created sparse file the file will be just a few KB in size.