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Linked Clones: Lab Manager vs vCloud Director

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blckgrffn

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One of the big "features" added to vCloud Director that allows it "parity" when compared to the outgoing Lab Manager is the re-introduction of Linked Clones. These Copy-On-Write (CoW) disks provide for VMs that are actually little more than differencing disks from a base disk.

Well, in LM and vCD, it is supposed to save space too. One beef I have with the current implementation in vCD is that it is actually worse when compared to LM. The root of the issue, is that in Lab Manager you could cleanly create a VM from a template, this would stay thin provisioned and it would act just like a classic VM, no linked clones and no CoW. Well, in vCD you always get a linked clone no matter how you provision the VM if your Org has fast provisioning enabled. This is also true for consolidations, where in LM you get a clean VM as result and in vCD you continue to get a linked clone, chain length of one.

In the long run, this is going to negatively impact disk space utilization. As you are forced to always write to the differencing disk with Linked Clones, LM actually offered a nifty hybrid approach that allowed for overwriting the base disk when the VM was freshly provisioned or freshly consolidated. This is a step backwards.

I don't know how many LM or vCD customers there are here, but just an FYI that they are subtly different.

I've gotten some really good information from this forum lately and wanted to share some back, if possible.

Frankly, I'd rather not use them at all but we are not doing anything nifty on the storage back end that would allow for us to use space as effectively (at least in the short term...) without them.
 
I fail to see how this would negatively impact storage utilization (space)? If all you are doing is writing to a small delta or am I missing the point? I don't have experience with Lab Manger, only vCloud Director...and even moreso with View.
 
Not sure if what you want is resolved in the next release of vCD but a new release is coming very soon that makes things even more on par with what Lab Manager could do.
 
Vader said:
I fail to see how this would negatively impact storage utilization (space)? If all you are doing is writing to a small delta or am I missing the point? I don't have experience with Lab Manger, only vCloud Director...and even moreso with View.
Click to expand...

Think of Windows updates, not the greatest example but it will do. Rather than overwriting files like we'd get with LM VMs, everything is going into the CoW. Space usage++ Even in Lab Manager, we have Linked Clone "trees" that are at times hundreds of GB, and sometimes into the TB In size and encompass tens of VMs. VMware offers little in the way of managing this resulting clusterfudge. Making everything a linked clone despite how it is deployed/freshly consolidated means that the VM basically always has a snap running. Think of what looks you would get if you deployed a normal environment and said that every VM was to have a snap running for its entire life just after it was created.

I bet you'd get some looks... and not the nice kind!

Also, disk performance (IOPS). One write turns into read/miss/read/write/write. Awesome sauce.

My point was that we had a combination of this (have thin provisioned VMs and linked clones) going on in LM, whereas we are being forced to choose in vCD.

TL;DR - Think long and hard (hehe) about enable Fast Provisioning in vCloud Director. It is not the same as VDI.

Yep, fully aware there is a new version dropping before long, we've been meeting with folks about feature requests/needs we have before the migration, but I was unaware we were getting more LM like features (I thought that was what 1.5 was for). Any interesting details to share? :)

Given that their "migration" path is "suck it up", we aren't overly pleased with that aspect of the product ;)
 
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I don't know what exactly is coming in the next vCD...I haven't seen a full list yet. I know VXLAN support, direct Nexus 1000v, and moving lab/dev environments from dev/test/UAT is coming. Nothing more specific than that.
 
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