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Can thin provisioning affect performance on a NFS volume?

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Category:
ontap-9
Specialty:
perf
Last Updated:

Applies to

ONTAP 9

Answer

  • No, as NFS performs the same on all Unix systems thin or thick
  • However, On ESXi NFS datastores, it is worth noting that thick volumes have eager and lazy zero settings
  • The zeroing happens when a write is sent to the storage, inducing a performance penalty as it induces a block freeing NFS call
  • It is recommended to use thin provisioning from ONTAP to ensure best performance and space savings, along with VAAI

Additional Information

VMware Blog on VAAI
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