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Why does flex volume clone split take a long time?

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ontap-9
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Applies to

  • ONTAP 9.3 and below
  • Clustered Data ONTAP 8
  • Data ONTAP 7-Mode

Answer

  1. The clone-splitting operation in general might take a considerable amount of time to complete.
  2. The clone split has to transfer every bit of data and free inodes to the volume that is being cloned.
  3. Clone split operation is usually a slow process especially when any volume has high inode count.

The clone-splitting operation is a copy operation that might take considerable time and resources to carry out because of the following reasons:

  • Free blocks in the aggregate are used to copy blocks shared between the parent and the clone
  • Clone-splitting incurs disk I/O operations, and can potentially compete with other disk operations in the aggregate
  • Clone-splitting uses some available CPU resources, which may impact the performance of a fully-loaded storage controller

ONTAP addresses the potential performance impact of the clone split operation. The clone split operation runs in the background and priorities are set in such a way that it does not significantly impact foreground operations. Data ONTAP also provides commands to stop or check the status of a clone split operation such as:

vol clone stop cl_vol_name

vol clone status cl_vol_name

Additional Information

FAQ - FlexClone split

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