How VMs will behave on deduplicated storage?

[Dhakshinamoorth]

Hi all,

I have EMC Storage. I created one deduplicated LUN and i mounted that LUN into vsphere 4.1 server. i installed three windows xp VMs on deduplicated LUN. how VMs will behave? because,windows common files across three VMs are same.

[vGuy]

I hope the below link will give you more insights on performance impact & considerations:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6065-achieve-storage-effficiency-celerra-dedup-...

[Gav0]

we use depupe extensively in our environment (although with Netapp FAS) and dont see any performance hits.  The dedupe is done at the block level so machines with common os files etc will just have markers pointing to the existing block - rather then having a copy of their own - if one of the machines somehow changes something it then becomes unique and will wright a new block for that change - the existing dedupe'd block will remain intact.