[geeks] recipe for Linux / iSCSI / thin provisioned space

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, der Mouse wrote:

>> I have successfully provisioned a small iSCSI target that is "thick"
>> (takes up 1GB disk space when provisioned as 1GB of space), but
>> obviously this is not terribly useful.
>
> Obviously?  I must be missing something; that's exactly how I'd expect
> it to work.  How would it occupy any less space?  Compression comes to
> mind, but that would be an odd usage of the thick-vs-thin terminology.

Thin-provisioning means that the full gamut of blocks in the device are
mapped-out ahead of time but only allocated on-demand through indirection.

Imagine a sparse file as the backing store for a filesystem, and you'll
have the idea pretty close.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |