Page History

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VM Path (optional)

• Path Defines path on VM host where VM files are stored (working directories will reside (contains .vmx, delta, .vswp, nvram ...files)
• If not configured, the Datastore Path location will be used
• VCL creates a directory under the VM Path directory for each VM it creates
  • Contains the .vmx file which defines the VM
  • Contains delta vmdk files which are written to as changes are made to the VM's hard drive
• VM Path may either reside on local or network storage
• Location should be dedicated for each VM host
  • Multiple VM hosts should not share the same VM Path location for performance and image safety reasons
  • VM Paths of multiple hosts may reside on the same volume but a subdirectory should be created for each host
• Storage where the VM Path is located should be optimized for read-write performance

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• Not used at the current time
• Will eventually determine whether VMs are assigned MAC addresses defined in the VCL database or if random MAC addresses should be assigned

Configuration Examples

Local Disk Only - Repository Mounted via NFS Image Added

The diagram above shows a simple VCL configuration with 1 management node and 2 VMware ESXi hosts.  Network storage is not used.
The local disks on the VM hosts are used to store all of the files used by running VMs including the VM's working directory and the master vmdk image.

A directory on the local disk on the management node is used to as the image repository.  This directory is exported via NFS.  VM hosts mount this directory as a datastore named "repository".  Mounting the repository directly on the VM hosts allows the vmkfstools utility to be used on the VM hosts to copy and convert images directly from the repository to the local datastore in a single step.

If an image is to be loaded on a VM host and that image does not already exist in the VM host's local datastore, it is automatically copied from the repository to the VM host's local datastore at the beginning of the load process.

During image capture, images are automatically copied to from the VM host's local datastore to the repository.  This allows images captured on a VM host to be loaded on any other VM host.

The VM host profile VM Disk parameter is set to localdisk.  This indicates to the load process that the VM host's datastore path is dedicated to the VM host and not shared by other VM hosts.  This allows images to be deleted from the VM host's local datastore if another image must be copied from the repository and not enough space is available.

Local Disk Only - Repository Not Available via NFS Image Added

This example is identical to the one above except that the repository located on the management node's local disk is not exported via NFS.  Because of this, image must be transferred using SCP instead of vmkfstools.  This is less desirable than mounting the repository directly on the VM hosts because images cannot be copied and converted in a single step.  Images are stored in the repository in the 2GB sparse format.  This allows the images to be copied via SCP while only transferring the data stored in the image, not the entire size of the hard drive stored in the image.  VMware ESXi cannot run VMs using vmdk images stored in the 2GB sparse format.  Images are converted to the vmfs thin format so that they can be loaded on VMware ESXi.  This adds extra time to the load process if an image does not exist in the VM's local datastore and must be copied from the repository.  It also requires additional space in the VM host's local datastore becuase 2 copies of the image exist while it is being converted.
Note that the VM host profile Repository Path parameter is set to the path on the management node's hard drive.  The code first checks if the path exists on the VM host.  If not, it assumes the repository is not mounted directly on the VM host and the Repository Path value refers to a location on the management node.