Query on VM Linked Clone disk support in vSphere 5?

[viveksh]

Hi,

I request a confirmation if configuring VMs with disks in Linked Clone mode is officially supported in vSphere 5.0/5.1/5.5

From whatever I have read on the web, Linked Clone is a feature of VMware Workstation and other VDI solutions like View.

There is no official statement about Linked Clone support in vSphere that I could find, except that the below link

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-2-storage-vmotion.html

which has a statement -

"Storage vMotion will work with Virtual Machines that have snapshots/linked clones"

On the other hand, I saw the following links, related to linked  clones - but no direct reference to official support on VMware vSphere for linked clone:

https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_clone_overview.html

http://sanbarrow.com/linkedcloneswithesxi.html

http://sourceforge.net/p/vghetto/code/HEAD/tree/scripts/vGhettoLinkedClone.pl

http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=52117

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/tag/linked-clone

It would be appreciated if someone could confirm on the above. If Linked Clone is indeed supported, could you please point

me to appropriate documentation from VMware on how to configure the same in vSphere?

Thanks,

Vivek

[viveksh]

Any answers please?

[viveksh · Accepted solution]

Okay, got the answer through another medium.

Linked clones are supported in vSphere 5.x . It is implicitly part of VMODL API, clone and relocate.  It is an API only feature. It is called ‘Linked Virtual Machines’

More info - https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/linked_vms_note.pdf