Thanks for the follow up here too - it's caused us a few headaches as we've always used clones to provide alternative environments for databases/corporate applications etc.

But (there's always a but...) I've looked in the documentation here: https://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/topic/com.netapp.doc.dot-cm-vsmg/GUID-9DBC1CDF-00E2-4831-BEE1-4CE57F9123DE.html and it seems very clear, as your extract shows, this is currently AFF only.

I can see an argument could be made around potential performance issues but I would still like to see the feature available on FAS, especially where we have FlashCache and/or FlashPool involved to help mitigate against potential performance issues from running this process on spinning rust.

Please could you raise it that FAS customers are also interested in this feature Jeffrey? Or does it work but not officially supported in some way - I don't have a cluster updated to 9.4 yet to test out on.

Cheers,

Steve

On Tue, 2018-10-09 at 18:52 +0000, Steiner, Jeffrey wrote:

Greetings from the year 2017. This issue is fixed now. From the ONTAP 9.4 documentation:

The improved FlexClone splitting operation on AFF systems has the following benefits:

Storage efficiency is preserved after splitting the clone from the parent.
Existing Snapshot copies are not deleted.
The operation is faster.

Not only do we preserve snapshots during a clone, but it's space efficient! You can split clones and get rid of the locked snapshot on the parent!