Windows deploy slooooooow, linux deploy lightning fast

[billdossett]

I don't get this - and not sure if its actaully vsan related, but I just finished upgrading my lab vsan to all flash and I went to deploy a windows template and it took nearly 10 minutes... 40GB disk.

I then deployed a RHEL 7 from template and it took about 15 seconds...

All of my templates have been created on this cluster so they have the default vsan storage policy.

But looking at the templates, I can see that the storage usage for the linux is around 3GB so this is clearly thin as the disk size is 80GB. The storage for my Window2012 template is 29GB - the harddisk is specified as 40GB and my windows 2016 template says storage use is 40GB and it is a 40GB disk...  90% of what I do in my lab is with Linux, so its fine - but it seems kind of weird.

Can anyone offer any ideas on what I am seeing?

Thanks

Bill

[NicolasAlauzet]

Hi Bill.

Is there any resync task running? Health issue?

Run a performance test to check any issues on that area.

Other test you can do is install a clean windows, copy some files into it (the install iso file then you can duplicate to inflate the disk fast) and then try the cloning action. This way you can discard if there is a template related issue (This should not take more than 10 min)

Cheers

N

[lucasbernadsky]

Hi bill.

Please take a look at what Nicolas said, it makes perfect sense.

Only to add a little something: If you need to grow the guest file system usage, take in consideration that if you have Deduplication & compression enabled it may not grow as fast as expected.

Also, another test worth the try would be to apply a different storage policy with more stripes to the template and see if the performance improves. Nonetheless, with almost any storage policy a windows deploy shouldn't take that long.