Typical Scenario:
I want to have 4 ESX systems with 4 identical Virtual Machines each. All the virtual machines
share a common data store and each virtual machine has been assigned a disk space
of 100 GB. The environment is managed by virtual center.
Total number of VM's = 4VMs x 4ESX = 16 VMs.
Total number of disk space consumed = 16 x 100GB = 1600GB or ~ 1.6 TB.
Is everything fine so far?
How about cutting down on space used to 800 GB or less?
virtual machines by 50% or more. NetApp dedupe technology eliminates duplicate data at a block level.
Hence there is no significant performance impact to the production virtual machines while running dedupe.
Also deduplication can be scheduled per volume even at a later time. Imagine your scenario where you have
identical say Windows virtual machines. 16 copies of "C:\Program Files" are almost identical even at a file
level. NetApp dedupe runs at a block level and hence the factor of dedupe is very high.
VMware before dedupe
VMware after dedupe on NetApp
ESX supports three protocols namely FC, NFS and ISCSI for the datastore. All the three protocols are supported
by any NetApp Unified storage system and dedupe works on all the three protocol data sets.
True benefits of VMware deduplication on NetApp storage
1. Save Storage Space by 50% or more
2. Save costs and reduce your datacenter footprints
3. Move closer towards a greener datacenter plan
4. Reduce network bandwidth with less data blocks to replicate to Disaster Recovery site
5. Dedupe factor more than 90% for backup/archive data
For all these benefits NetApp deduplication is built-in feature and freely available to use on all systems.
Read more on the NetApp 50% space savings program for VMware at
http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/guarantee.html
http://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/vmware.html
Let me know your inputs and comments
