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BrianRTS
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Linked Clones and vApp/vSphere 5 Question

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!

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chriswahl
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Sounds possible from a vCloud Director standpoint. Otherwise it may entail some sort of script.

VCDX #104 (DCV, NV) ஃ WahlNetwork.com ஃ @ChrisWahl ஃ Author, Networking for VMware Administrators
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dan13476
Contributor
Contributor

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.

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