One of the most important metrics for success as viewed by your consumers is overall provisioning time, or how long users have to wait for a requested VM. As users grow accustomed to private and public cloud consumption, their expectations for acceptable time frames will become more aggressive. This means administrators need to regularly look for opportunities to optimize their configuration.


Experienced vCommander® administrators understand that they can improve the deployment time for services by deploying as linked clones or with thin disks, but may not be aware of options to do the same thing with thick disks:


Deploying from Thin to Thick

Another option for speeding up deployments when you must deploy VMs with thick disks is to deploy from source images that have thin disks. Doing so significantly reduces the read time necessary upon deployment, because only the actual written data must be read from a thin disk. When a thick disk is being read for deployment, in addition to the written data, the unwrittten or insignificant disk space ignored by thin disks is read. 


This does not create a problem for situations where the entire disk must be provisioned right from the start, because you can configure your deployment destinations to use thick disks.


See Also