[one-users] VMWare Server 2.0 and non-persistent images to minimize copy when deploying

[Manish Sapariya]

  Hi All,
I thought somebody will find this useful and hence
sharing it here.

We are using opennebula based setup to test our
collaboration product. We have home grown test framework
which can run clients on different machines to execute
test scenarios. Things were fine until we had only few
users in our test. However as I added more users in test,
the VMs deploying started taking too long because of the
image copying. My frontend is on FC8, with big SATA disk.
The datastore is expored using CIFS. The VMWare Hypervisors
mount the datastore using CIFS to run the VMs.

To minimize the copy of the whole disk on deploy, we
followed solution detailed in 1, which is briefly mentioned
as below.

- Create your base image, call it basevm.
- Modify the disk settings to non-persistent.
- Now create another VM, clone1 , using the disk of
   basevm.
   - Set the new disk as non-persistent.
- Create the vm template pointing to clone1. Note that
   both the basevm and clone1 images should be in your
   exported datastore path.
- Deploy as many VMs as you like, with just few MBs of
   data to copied.

Hope this helps somebody.

1. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/15339


-- 
Thanks and Regards,
Manish

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