Good afternoon all,
Currently I am evaulating moving my production environment to vSphere 5 and I am looking into using linked clones. First let me explain my current setup.
I have a demo set of 5 VM's all running 2008 R2, There is a DC, SQL server, Exchange server and so forth. What I currently do is get one set fully updated and then shutdown and set all VM's to be in NP mode. I then convert the demo set to templates and as needed deploy each set to users as a vApp. This works fine however the disk space gets out of hand quickly as the base set is ~500gb (plus whatever delta's the users create) times however many sets I need.
I'd like to use linked clones for each set of images that users get..so each user will still have their own disk set/delta disks for whatever they need but in theory each disk set should be much smaller as i am only storing the delta's vs the base disk + the deltas.
Is this at all possible? I will be upgrading my lab vCenter to play with this hopefully next week but I figured I;d bounce the idea off the forum as well.
Thanks!
Sounds possible from a vCloud Director standpoint. Otherwise it may entail some sort of script.
Closest to what you want sounds like some scripts already developed by Ruben Garcia.
Links to his scripts are here:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/2012657
There's quite a few others out there if you hunt around, but I think those ones with the ability to clone a vApp full of vms as linked clones looks like what you need.
Cheers,
Dan.