VMware Horizon Community
Pelenor_
Contributor
Contributor

"Deduplication" of virtual disks

Hi, I have about 50 vidrual desktops with same OS and aplications. Each of this VM has 10 GB disk. And there is a problem. 90% of data on the disks are the same, all were deployed from one template. Exist any way how to use one "core" disk which can reed all users and personal data were stored in personalized delta files?

Many thanks for answer

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kbk00
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

What storage are you using today? On the VMware side, there is no solution for dedup as they let that to the storage vendors. Your storage platform may have a solution but if not, a NetApp filer with the dedup option might work out for you. We've been using the smallest device they have for testing and it works pretty well. We've implemented NFS and dedup for some really nice storage savings. The nice thing about the setup is that the VMDKs are all thinly provisioned by default (VMDK is only as large as the data that's being stored). With NFS, on-the-fly datastore expansion is really cool, as well. The 2TB limit of vmfs3 is also not a factor.

Our Netapp environment is still really small and isn't mature so perhaps our setup won't operate well in the long-term (people may scoff at the NFS option above) but for us right now, performance and cost are showing a lot of promise.

Check out the link for storage protocol comparisons:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/storage_protocol_perf.pdf

DataDomain is another vendor that has a strong dedup play in the space, as well.

Edit: Oh yeah, to specifically answer your question: I think Wyse Streaming Manager is some software you might like. It'll take a template and allow you to run VMs off that. Once instance to update and there's actually zero shared storage required (outside of a w2k3 system with the image and profiles). It's really a funky setup that could work really well. I had it running for a bit and Wyse had the solution running kiosks at VMworld 06, i think. For some reason I don't see it mentioned on the forums very often.

If you found this posting to be useful, great. I didn't waste your time.
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

VMware announced a technologie named SVI (Scalable Virtual Images) back on the VMworld Europe 2008.

http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cio.de%2Fnews%2Fcio_worldnews%2F85107...

I thin that's what you are looking for.

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