Deleted extent, data still exists?

[Jaknell1011]

If I deleted the extent, can anyone explain why the data still exists, but yet I cannot find anything with it in shell?

 

[cyberjock]

Please don't make multiple threads on the same topic.

 

[Jaknell1011]

Man I gotta admit I was pretty excited to get an email to one of my questions, considering the major problem I am having, only to find this is the reply.

I posted again because I had no luck with my other post, so I made one that was not as specific, hoping someone would pitch in any form of brainstorming they could offer.

Any ideas on what could cause this problem described above, cyberjock? Have you ever seen this happen or can you replicate it in a vm?

 

[cyberjock]

I haven't tried it before, but if you deleted an extent it would immediately go offline. I'm going to assume you have made a mistake in what your actual configuration is. It is also possible that since you haven't toggled iscsi off/on or rebootedit is still available. Deleting an extent in the GUI doesn't delete the data on the disk as far as I know. But I have very little experience with iscsi on FreeNAS at the moment because of my server configuration. I just don't use iscsi for much and am only using it now to do some performance analysis.

 

[Jaknell1011]

So it seems like even though the extent is gone, the data is still safe. This is great news to me. Now if only I could figure out how to recreate the extent with the data I have inside it...

 

[Jaknell1011]

OK So if I start from scratch, is there a better way for my ESX hosts to see the data than using an extent? Ideally, I would like to be able to actually view (browse) the VM files, rather than browsing to one large extent file...

When I was doing this before, if I opened a file explorer to the Freenas, all I would see is the jails folder, and my extent, but I could not actually see the data.

***UPDATE***

Did some more research and tried setting up NFS Share for my ESX hosts. This seems to work fine. I am concerned about the performance difference. I was hoping to be able to use crashplan to backup some of the VM files, but crashplan only sees the extent as one file, so I would be backing up my entire 7TB extent to the cloud.

 

[pirateghost]

The extent is presented to the initiator as a block level device. Your FREENAS box has no idea what is inside that extent, nor does it care. To the FreeNAS system you only presented a file to an iscsi share. You should not be using iSCSI if you are wanting to have file level access to the data stored on it from another machine. This is just how iSCSI works.

I would recommend NFS for datastores if you care about that sort of thing.

 

[Jaknell1011]

Looking into NFS datastores now. Already have one setup and I am now considering and testing the performance difference between the two.

If I were to create another target to the extent and use an ISCSI initiator from a Windows machine, would I get file level access that way? Then I would be able to browse the VM store from that machine, correct?

 

[cyberjock]

iSCSI is not a clustering file system.