On Wed, 23 Feb 2011, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
So you're not worried about the security implication of leftovers in free
space, and just want a base image to clone for new customers?
The logical thing to do is to keep the origin volume untouched (except
for upgrading now and then), and take a snapshot for each customer.
Each snapshot would then be a new clone of the origin. Unfortunately,
large numbers of snapshots are inefficient for writes to new data,
so you'd likely have to "dd" to an independent LV instead. (This is being
worked on, and there are 3rd party products like Zumastor that fix it now.)
Actually, if you never (or rarely) write to the origin, lots of snapshots
should be fine.