VMware Horizon Community
rcrisci
Contributor
Contributor

View linked clones on ESXi host local disks?

Has anyone used the local ESXi disks as storage for linked clones?  It seems to run very quickly this way, and I cant really find a downside to it.

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StuartB20111014
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

Just off the top of my head, you wouldn't be able to storage vmotion the machines if you had your system setup in a cluster. Also if you lost a host, you wouldn't be able to get to those disks untill the host had been brought back online. It depends on your environment. Im my environment, with thousands of VDI users, if we need to upgrade a host etc it can be done seamlessly, whereas with local storage and one host you may well have an issue. That and expansion. when you have multiple hosts for VDI, all hosts must be able to see all VDI storage or they will refuse to provision.

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mittim12
Immortal
Immortal

The downside as it has already been stated is availability.   The clones and replica are tied to a resource and can't be moved seamlessy in the event of scheduled downtime or unexpected downtime.   Whether or not this is a problem depends on what kind of pools you are using.  If you have a floating pool with some type of roaming profiles then it wouldn't really cause an issue provided other host in your environment were up and running and could handle the load. 

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rcrisci
Contributor
Contributor

We are using a cluster.  The parent  VMs are housed on our SAN.  And View Composer can see both of the local datastores (on the 2 ESXi hosts) and spins up the linked clones on the local host with the corrosponding local datastore.  So from a failure perspective - the biggest downside I see is that we would need to re-compose all of the linked clones that were on the failed host.

Make sense?  Just wanted to put it out there in case there is a wrinkle that I am not foreseeeing.

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rcrisci
Contributor
Contributor

We are using roaming profiles and the clones are auto-deleted whenever someone logs out.

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kgsivan
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Not only that. If you are provisioning View desktop on a local datastore where ESX is memeber of a DRS enabled cluster, then there are chances that he vm gets registered in other esx in the same cluster (during a power on operation of a VM). This time the second esx will not able to load the vmdk file from Local datastore of a for foreign ESX  and end up in failing power on operation.

This heavily impacts in case if you perform a any maintenance operations like Refresh, recompose, and rebalance, and even in the case of appliying power policy

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rcrisci
Contributor
Contributor

Those are good points.  I have been watching and so far the vms have all been registering on the same hosts that they are stored on, but I will look though my logs and see if that is just because provisioning has been failing when they get pushed to the other host.  How does this effect refresh, rebalance, and recompose?

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