If I run a manual clone in the same volume where there are a dozen or less .VMDk’s the copy takes several minutes and says it's copying blocks – maybe I’m missing something, but it does seem to be a copy rather than a clone, see output below:
Create an initial clone:
clone start /vol/vol030102/200907071418020625410/wwdelme_test.vmdk /vol/vol030102/200907071418020625410/wwdelme2_test.vmdk -l
Volume capacity after clone – so it copies the blocks, but you can see dedupe savings also go up so it’s a fully deduped copy:
ldnengna03n01> df -s -g /vol/vol030102
Filesystem used saved %saved
/vol/vol030102/ 632GB 401GB 39%
This is what the clone status shows when the clone is running:
ID: 1
Source: /vol/vol030102/200907071418020625410/200907071418020625410_0-flat.vmdk
Destination: /vol/vol030102/200907071418020625410/wwdelme_test.vmdk
Block ranges:
State: running (71% done)
Total blocks: 5242880
Blocks copied: 1240849
Type: file
Why is copying taking place when the clone is within the same volume as the source VMDK? The only reason I can think of is that blocks in the VMDK representing free space are exceeding the 255 reference limit and new copies are being made – but that doesn’t explain why the initial clone of a VMDK should take so long and subsequent clones are quick. Any ideas or observations? Thanks.