yyaazz's tech thoughts

In a typical NetApp & vSphere environment there are two well-known options to create a clone of a Virtual Machine. The first one is the vSphere default and the second is the NetApp rapid clone. The vSphere default clone is a simple copy operation from filesystem point of view, so if you browse the datastore you’ll see the same files in the source and target VM’s directory, except for the log files. The NetApp rapid cloning utility is doing the things in an other way, we’ll see how. But first of all, let’s talk about the configuration.

• NetApp FAS2040, 500GB NFS datastore (standard 1Gbit onboard port)
• vSphere 4.1 with NetApp Virtual Storage Console 2.0.1
• Windows 2008R2 VM, contains a ~7GB VMDK

Read more…

Few days ago I posted some performance test results with VMware vStorage API for Array Integration. I went through the test again, but insted of Fibre Channel I have iSCSI today.

I have the same piece of HW except for the connection:

• Cisco UCS B200 blade system with two X5550 sockets and 48GB of RAM
• NetApp FAS2040 with 12×300 FC 15krpm disks. For this test I’ve created an aggregate of 9 disks.

In the last test I had 4Gb Fibre Channel connection and now I have simple 1Gb iSCSI. I repeated the same steps, the only difference is the size of the VMDK I’ve added to the Virtual Machine: Read more…