On 2013-04-04, at 14:58, "Anand Patil" <anand.prabhakar.patil@gmail.com> wrote:

This is a cross-post from http://serverfault.com/questions/495966/are-snapshots-and-clones-filesystem-wide-in-zfs-backed-lustre-clusters.

I'm looking for a distributed filesystem on Linux that supports ZFS-like lightweight snapshots and snapshot clones, and I'm trying to figure out whether Lustre + ZFS is the solution.

If I set up a ZFS-backed distributed Lustre filesystem, will I be able to snapshot it, and then mount and clone those snapshots? Or would the ZFS snapshot features operate at the level of individual OSS's rather than across the entire distributed filesystem?

The snapshots will only be at the OST and MDT level, not filesysytem-wide. This would be useful for backup (mostly on the MDT), but couldn't be used for mounting as a distributed filesystem without extra effort (changing the filesystem name and configuration of the snapshot devices). 

This release only introduced the use of ZFS as a back-end filesystem, and the use of additional features like distributed snapshots still needs to be developed.