When creating VM allow creating sparse zvol

,

Currently when creating VM you can only create thick zvol.

I always use sparse zvols because that’s more storage efficient. But I have to either first create the sparse zvol or change it to sparse later in CLI.

So I suggest that there should be checkbox when creating VM to allow making the zvol sparse.

Or you could make GUI option to convert thick zvols to sparse in datasets page.

Thanks.

1 Like

They might just use safer setting as tool tip shows

 Help: Sparse
Enable to use thin provisioning where disk space for this volume is allocated ‘on demand’ as new writes are received. Use caution when enabling this feature, as writes can fail when the pool is low on space.

I seem to recall there being a technical reason about why this wasn’t implemented, but I might totally be wrong.

Following.

Voted for this. I do this manually, and while I very infrequently build new VMs this would be a really nice addition. Like in the default behavior now, and similar to ESXI, it should still default to “fat” volumes. However, having an option to thin provision shouldn’t require leaving the page and pre-provisioning the zvol each time.

I mean, you can overprovision your pool and run out of space. Its very easy to shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t know what you are doing. But in a world with compression, block cloning and dedupe, thin provisioning’s value can’t be understated.

1 Like

It also can’t be understated how easy it is to shoot oneself in the foot with dedup.

2 Likes

I’m speaking more about the future when fast dedup is coming in 2.3 :slight_smile:

Sorry for not being clear.

Since this request would be in a future version and all.