In addition to bug fixes, NLVM provides the following enhancements and changes in OES 2018 SP2:
The traditional storage provisioning (thick provisioning) is a type of storage allocation in which the blocks of data on a disk is allocated in advance. With thick provisioning, the large pools of storage capacity are allocated to individual services but remain unused. In thin provisioning, the blocks of data are allocated on-demand; that is, the storage is provisioned but not consumed until the data is written. When you delete the data on thin-provisioned storage, the free space is released to the storage system. This type of storage allocation helps to optimize the utilization of the available storage.
Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, OES supports thin provisioning on a storage device, which allows you to discard (or trim) blocks that are not in use by the pool. The fstrim command allows you to trim the unused blocks in the NSS pool. fstrim is supported only on thin-provisioned SCSI devices with VMware ESXi on a linear target. For more information, see Section 6.22, Fstrim Pool. You can also view the fstrim state, last executed time, and last trimmed size on the selected pool using the Section 6.23, Fstrim Status command.
Also, added a new option Blk_discard_on_delete on in the nlvm.conf file to discard the blocks on a thin-provisioned storage disk when you delete a pool on that disk. For more information, see Blk_discard_on_delete on.
Beginning with OES 2018 SP2, NSS supports the AES-256 encryption algorithm while creating encrypted volumes. For more information, see Section 6.10, Create Volume.