Reduce the time it takes to deploy virtual environments
Could a delta of the VHD (virtual hard disk) be created when deploying the virtual machine in the Lab Management tool instead of creating a full copy of the VHD? This would do two things: 1) greatly speed up the time that it takes to deploy the virtual environments 2) reduce the amount of SAN storage that is needed to support Lab Management.
Rich Alexander
shared this idea
There are two ways in which this can be done – (a) Use differencing disks for VHDs or (b) Use SAN’s capabilities to do rapid cloning of LUNs. The first one is too complex to manage across a large number of hosts. Furthermore SCVMM (possibly next version as well) does not support this. The second option is where we think this idea might see light. As we make more progress, we will know whether this is feasible, and what infrastructure requirements this would impose. Thanks for the suggestion.
Vijay Machiraju – Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio Test and Lab Management
4 comments
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Travis Shepherd
commented
As long as differencing disks are stored on the SAN accessible to all hosts, why is it complex to manage across a large number of hosts? VMWare Lab Manager has had this for a while and it works very well for testing large, pre-configured environments. Cloning takes less than 30 seconds and the disk space used is negligible.
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Anonymous
commented
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There are two ways in which this can be done - (a) Use differencing disks for VHDs or (b) Use SAN's capabilities to do rapid cloning of LUNs. The first one is too complex to manage across a large number of hosts. Furthermore SCVMM (possibly next version as well) does not support this. The second option is where we think this idea might see light. As we make more progress, we will know whether this is feasible, and what infrastructure requirements this would impose. Thanks for the suggestion.
Vijay Machiraju - Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio Test and Lab Management
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James Jeanette
commented
This is needed!
