NFS Thin Provisioning

[SeanDA]

I am setting up a VDI environment for a customer, and we are using a NetApp filer and NFS for the data store.

VM .vmdk files stored on NFS data stores are thin provisioned by default - Right?

My XP Template has a single 10GB .vmdk file, and when I provision VM's from it the vmdk file is 10 GB not the expected 2GB (which is the used space on the template)

My question is..... Is NFS thin provisioning for VM's only applicable on new, manually created VM's? and not those deployed from tempaltes?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

[SeanDA]

After logging a support request, I have been informed that this 'feature' has been pulled, and that thin disks are deployed as thick disks (from a template) by design!

Well that blows my SAN storage.......

[rjb2]

Can't you run ASIS on the volume and essentially make them thin?

[SeanDA]

Yes, we are looking into that now. Things are complicated in that we are using an IBM N-Series (NetApp 2050) so we need to get the licenses through IBM.

Do you use A-SIS, and does it work well?

[rjb2]

We have a cluster with 29 VM's attached to a 300 GB NFS volume. We run ASIS on the volume at night. I browsed the datastore and did a very rough estimate of the VMDK file sizes for the 29 VM's and came up with around 500 GB total. The 300 GB datastore has 180 GB free, so we are using 120 GB (maybe less after ASIS runs again tonight). The VM's are a mix of Windows OS versions and some Linux machines, so these VM's are more varied than in a pure XP desktop environment. I suspect ASIS would work even better on a volume containing all XP desktops.

[kcollo]

I have just started using ASIS on VMware ISCSI volume. We do thin provisioning as well on the NAS. Here is a link to a blog that I put up and will be updating

http://blog.colovirt.com/2008/10/23/netapp-deduplication-a-sis-and-vmware/

Asis has only been running on the volume for a few days and there are 9 virtual machines there. I will be moving over a lot more in the next few weeks. The current compression is as follows:

Filesystem used saved %saved

/vol/vmware/ 96GB 99GB 51%

kevin@colovirt.com