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5 Replies Last post: Sep 30, 2009 1:25 AM by iPhun  

Differential VMDKs on VMFS (vSphere 4) posted: Sep 28, 2009 2:35 AM

Click to view iPhun's profile Novice 6 posts since
Nov 24, 2008

I am currently investigating the conversion of ~50 phsyiscal blades, each housing two VMware GSX VMs to ESX v4. All the VMs have just slight differences (being the MySQL database), the rest of the OS and application are the same. Does anyone know if VMware supports something like differential disks on ESXvSphere 4? With this, one could save some terabytes on the expensive SAN storage.

Thanks for your comments,

iPhun.

Re: Differential VMDKs on VMFS (vSphere 4)

1. Sep 28, 2009 2:40 AM in response to: iPhun
Click to view Anton V Zhbankov's profile Champion 2,871 posts since
May 26, 2008
No, ESX does not have such feature for server VMs. But you can buy SAN with build-in deduplication, like NetApp FAS2000 and above.

---
MCP, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009
http://blog.vadmin.ru

Re: Differential VMDKs on VMFS (vSphere 4)

2. Sep 28, 2009 3:50 AM in response to: iPhun
Click to view AndreTheGiant's profile Guru 5,897 posts since
Aug 28, 2008
The linked clone technology is available only with VMware Lab Manager or VMware View Composer (this is not yet compatible with VC4).

Or (as written by Anton before) you can use a de-duplication solution at storage level (if your storage support this feature).

Andre

Re: Differential VMDKs on VMFS (vSphere 4)

3. Sep 29, 2009 2:19 PM in response to: AndreTheGiant
Click to view ehinkle's profile Hot Shot 249 posts since
Dec 2, 2004
You can also thin provision your disk.

Re: Differential VMDKs on VMFS (vSphere 4)

4. Sep 29, 2009 2:57 PM in response to: AndreTheGiant
Click to view lamw's profile Champion 2,803 posts since
Nov 27, 2007
Wrong, Linked Clones is available and supported via vSphere API, here is a vSphere SDK for Perl implementation: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/vGhettoLinkedClone.html

For more information there is also a VMware whitepaper on how this all works via the newly introduced functionality in vSphere: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/linked_vms_note.pdf

In the past it was true, Linked Clones was only available via Lab Manager and then View.

Here is also my hacked version of Linked Clones via Service Console/Busybox console for pre-ESX(i) 4.0:
Linked Clones script for ESX 3.x
Linked Clones script for ESXi


=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/
vGhetto Script Repository
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
VMware Developer Comuunity
Twitter: @lamw

http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/vexpert_silver_icon.jpg

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