I have a Centos 5.2 fileserver running LVM2, ext3 and Samba. I want to periodically snapshot a filesystem and offer them as read only backups to my users. I'm looking for something similar to what's available on Netapp filers.

I am successfully able to create snapshots using LVM. But are there any performance issues in having multiple snapshots of the same filesystem at the same time?

Is there any other way i can offer filesystem snapshots to my users?

Thanks for any guidance!

- Raja