Golden image with 2 disks - possible ?

[Najtsob]

Hello,

I am deploying linked clone desktops for Viewplanner 3.0.1 tests and I have issues, which are related to view and linked clones.

Linked clone pool is automated pool with floating assignment.

Golden image needs to have two disks, first is 16GB disk which is system C: drive and second one is 1GB disk (drive E:) which holds test data.

Issues that I am experiencing are either:

1) when I set data disk as independent, it is not cloned and added to the linked clone VMs

2) when I set data disk as dependent then it is added to the linked clone VMs, but it is also a linked clone which causes following error "Error: Heap seSparse could not be grown by 12288 bytes for allocation of 12288 bytes" if you have more than 100 VMs per host.
I suspect that this is related to the following known issue

After you upgrade to vSphere 5.5, a heap size error can occur if you use space-efficient virtual disks and you have more than 200 linked-clone virtual machines per ESXi host. For example: Error: Heap seSparse could not be grown by 12288 bytes for allocation of 12288 bytes

Workaround: Reduce the number of linked-clone virtual machines that use space-efficient virtual disks to less than 200 per ESXi host.

I think that since your VM has 2 linked clone disk (system disk C: and data disk E:) that it actually count as 2 linked clone VMs each with single disk. So instead of 200 linked clone VMs you are limited to just 100.

Virtual hardware of the Goldenimage is vmx-09 and I didn't set up anything regarding seSparse disks at least not that I would know.

Is there any way to create linked clone pool with floating assignment and that each VM would have full copy of additional data disk ?

Best regards

[mittim12]

1:  If your setting the disk to independent disk mode then it will ignore snapshots and that is likely why it isn't coming over to the linked clone.

[Najtsob]

OK, understandable.

But how about second option with disk set as dependant ?

[vcpguy]

I don't recollect but I read somewhere you can have 2 disks in Golden image but you need to be careful in the drive letter assignment and you need to take care that one disk cannot have multiple partitions inside the OS.

[Najtsob]

vcpguy wrote:

I don't recollect but I read somewhere you can have 2 disks in Golden image but you need to be careful in the drive letter assignment and you need to take care that one disk cannot have multiple partitions inside the OS.

That is not the problem, it works fine.

I need to resolve issue regarding dependant or independant additional disk as described in first post.

[mittim12]

The work around is to have less than 200 clones per host.  If you feel like the second disk counts as a single linked clone then try to keep less than 100 clones per host and see if you still have the problem.       If you do still have the problem than maybe it's not the number of linked clones per host causing the issue.    In that case you may need to open a support ticket to see if there are any internal KB articles assigned to that error. 

Another option is to disable the SE Sparse.

[Najtsob]

It works for up to 100 linked clones and it fails for 101 linked clones, so I am pretty sure that second disk counts as an additional linked clone.

How can I disable SE Sparse disks ? Preferably without downgrading to HW version 8.

Best regards

[mittim12]

I found this on Andre's site How to change Horizon View SESparse to VMFSSparse » myvirtualcloud.net.