Comments on: Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning

By: Welcome to vSphere-land! » Thin Provisioning Links

Welcome to vSphere-land! » Thin Provisioning Links — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:10:52 +0000

[...] (The Storage Architect) Reclaiming unused VMDK space with storage thin provisioning (SearchVMware) Provision a Thin Provisioned Standby LUN For vSphere Thin Provisioning (VM/ETC) VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics (Virtual Storage Guy) VCE-101 Thin [...]

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:59:18 +0000

Ray,

Your screen shots are of VMlogix linked clones correct? It may be an issue based on how they create a linked clone – for example I noticed the Snapshot column showed data in some of the VMs. I've never used VMLogix so I'm not sure.

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:58:00 +0000

Ray,

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:59:18 +0000

Ray,

By: RayBargi

RayBargi — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:17:42 +0000

So 2 things. Firstly to add to your closing statement “Combine vSphere Thin Provisioning with Storage Device Thin Provisioning”, it seems we can add third level of storage savings with linked clones based on a thin provisioned VM!

At my work we use VMLogix Lab Manager to provision and mange VMs. LM uses linked clones so I thought I try something out and I created two base templates, one Thick and one Thin provisioned. I then deployed a VM from each and the one based on the Thin provisioned VM worked perfectly and we saved 16GB of space.

In a situation where you would only have a few templates with a lot of linked clones running of them (Desktop Virtualization) the saving in space won’t be that great. But in an environment with many different templates with a relatively lower amount of clones (Lab Environment) the savings can be huge.

Secondly, it seems vSphere doesn't report provisioned space for Linked Clones correctly, in fact it shows double! Well sort of

In this screengrab http://s799.photobucket.com/albums/yy275/bargi/…
The Yellow highlighted VMs are the Thick base template and a clone deployed form it. In the Green is a Thin provisioned base template and its respective clone. You can see from the command line the sizes of the folders are correct and from the Storage Views Tab the sizes are also correct.

However in the grab http://s799.photobucket.com/albums/yy275/bargi/… you can see the Summary and Virtual Machines Tab are reporting the provisioned space wrong. Both are saying the provisioned space for the clones is 41GB which is double actual space “Provisioned” for the clone, which should be only 20GB.

Does anyone else find this or am I missing something?

Cheers

Ray

By: Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin | VM /ETC

Real Thin Provsioning And Over Allocation – The VI Admin | VM /ETC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:28:42 +0000

[...] already mentioned (and posted) about the vSphere Blog Contest current topic of thin provisioning, but I’ve been thinking [...]

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:24:54 +0000

Ray,

I am talking the same. Lab Manager, VMware View, Workstation linked clones is all the same technology. The linked clones are differencing (delta) disks from the parent template.
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_clone…

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:07:23 +0000

I mean ESX linked clones like in Lab Manager and View (I think you're talking about storage specific linked clones?)
It's a form of thin provisioning which can get you into just as much trouble if you over provision