We used to make extensive use of, and gained huge benefit from, dedup in ZFS. The specific use case was storage for VMWare clusters where we had hundreds of Linux and Windows VMs that were largely the same content. [this was pre-Docker]
I've read multiple comments on using dedup for VMs here. Wouldn't it be a lot more efficient for this to be implemented by the hypervisor rather than the filesystem?
I'm a former VMware certified admin. How do you envision this to work? All the data written to the VM's virtual disk will cause blocks to change and the storage array is the best place to keep track of that.
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COW is significantly slower and has nesting limits when compared to these deduped clones. Great question!
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