{"id":890,"date":"2011-10-28T11:33:26","date_gmt":"2011-10-28T15:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscolotti.us\/?p=890"},"modified":"2012-02-24T14:04:24","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T19:04:24","slug":"gotcha-vcloud-director-clone-wars-part-2-deep-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscolotti.us\/vmware\/gotcha-vcloud-director-clone-wars-part-2-deep-dive\/","title":{"rendered":"vCloud Director Clone Wars Part 2 (Deep Dive)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In part one<\/a> we looked at the simple challenge of how to try and balance the I\/O clone traffic on more than one host.  Although the fix is not ideal it does the job as best we can.  I decided to take a deeper look at this with a different scenario.  How does the cloning traffic flow when you are dealing with not only multiple clusters, but multiple vCenter Servers, and multiple datastores.  Let’s review the assumptions from part one:<\/p>\n

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  1. vApp templates in vCloud Director are not stored in vSphere as \u201cTemplate\u201d, they are simply a powered off Virtual Machine.<\/li>\n
  2. Powered off Virtual Machines are registered to any particular host that was last running them.<\/li>\n
  3. DRS will only move powered on Virtual Machines based on the load based algorithm except during a Maintenance Mode process you have the option to move powered off virtual machines.<\/li>\n
  4. You can manually migrate powered off virtual machines<\/li>\n
  5. When a clone happens on a given host, if the target location is a datastore seen by that host it will be a block level copy, if the target is a host without access to the source files, this will usually result in a network copy over the management interface.<\/li>\n
  6. The host that owns the registered virtual machine will be the one that performs the I\/O workload of the clone<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I wanted to think about this from the standpoint of a provider that will have a Published Catalog, where the vApps templates all reside in the same Org vDC, but are being deployed to completely different Provider vDC’s as well as possibly different vCenter Servers.  I set out just to see what happens for the sake of understanding if this would impact any particular design.  Below is a diagram of what I have setup in my lab.  All the storage is presented only to the individual clusters so there is no cross population and I could isolate the storage for each Provider vDC.<\/span><\/p>\n

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    Now there was a few things I wanted to look at to examine this clone function under vCloud Director.  What I set out to do was to see what happens for each scenario and how the operation may impact a potential design<\/p>\n