Storage Quotas - How does Thin Provisioning add value?

[blckgrffn]

Background - we've got a couple thousand VMs and ~40TB of storage in Lab Manager.  We are using VMFS on 2TB luns.

We are looking at vCloud director.  We honestly are not sorry to leave linked clones behind if we can actually get Thin Provisioning to work.

And work it does in vCloud director.

However, it counts the provisioned size against the quota, not the on-disk size.  Can this be changed?  If not, with one large DC how can we even leverage thin provisioning?  We don't have thin provisioning on our arrays currently, but that seems a little overkill to tackle what seems to be a simple calculation issue in vCloud Director.

I want to say that I am *very* excited about the way vCloud abstracts storage after dealing with the nightmare that is storage management in Lab Manager.

Your input is appreciated,
Nat

[dquintana]

Hello blckgrffn, for my opinion, large datacenters uses Storage based thin provisioning tools in order to not compromise the ESX server performance, and uses built in technologies to resolve this.

Regards

Diego Quintana

Userd Moderator

vExpert.

[depping]

How would using a thin provisioned disk impact ESX performance? I don't see how it could.

Anyway, I understand where you are coming from when it comes to Thin Provisioned disks and vCloud Director. vCloud Director in this case has been designed for the "Provider of the Resources" and in your usecase that doesn't work well as indeed it skews the numbers. Unfortunately currently, as fas as I know, there is not much you can do about that. The vCD engineers do visit this forum every once in a while and hopefully they will pick up on this usecase and add it to the long list of feature requests.

-d

[blckgrffn]

I am not sure where the performance concern came in - I am not concerned about that at all.

Frankly, if we can keep our users from making (and using) 20+ link deep linked clone trees I think we will be taking some heat off our disks and improving the user experience.

Also, to be clear, I was talking about using array level thin provisioning to oversubscribe our LUNS to get the same VM Density and allocation rates (~150-200%). vCloud Director makes no distinction between storage used vs storage provisioned when calculating against organization quotas which prevents the built in per vmdk thin provisioning from doing the same idependtly of array level tricks.

We need a way to throttle based on *actual* usage quotas.  This would be "safer" than the alternative, ie we could get things back running by just upping a quota value versus doing LUN or array level work.

Thanks for the responses, I appreciate the feedback.