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Fast Provisioning in VMware vCloud Director 1.5 (2005865)
Purpose
This article introduces you Fast Provisioning, a new feature in VMware vCloud Director 1.5.
Resolution
Fast Provisioning has these key characteristics:
The source template virtual machines are called primary virtual machines
Shadow virtual machines are created on demand
Subsequent copies to the same datastore are fast
Org Admin/User only sees the ‘source’ virtual machine. Shadow virtual machines are an implementation detail that are only visible to vCloud Director administrators.
Shadow virtual machines stored in System vDC
Shadow virtual machines disk space billed to the service provider
Fast Provisioning can be enabled at Org vDC Properties. You then select Enable Fast Provisioning on the Storage tab.
Note: Fast Provisioning is only supported for vSphere 5.0. Mixed clusters of ESX 4.x and ESXi 5.0 with vCenter 5.0 is not supported. Fast Provisioning should not be enabled for virtual machines spanning multiple datastores. If datastore free space threshold red/ yellow is reached, virtual machines will not be cloned.
Fast Provisioning consists of two elements:
Linked Clones
Multiple virtual machines accessing the same base disk
Identical blocks exist only once on physical datastore
Cross datastore not supported, hence not compatible with storage DRS
Shadow Virtual Machines
Within datastore in same vCenter Server and datastore it works like linked clones
For cross-datastore and cross-vCenter clones, full clone of original base disk are created on additional datastore. This clone serves as base disk on additional datastore
Fast Provisioning has these advantages:
Saves storage for same amount of data for guest operating system installation
Disk writes are not affected performance wise as they always go immediately to delta disk
Very fast cloning procedure as the base disk is not required to be copied again
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