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iTayb
Asked: 2011-01-11 12:54:21 +0800 CST

Is it possible to create a delta VM?

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I have a VM of approx. 18GB. Sometimes I need temporally clones of it, so I clone it. The problems are:

  • It takes a while until it's done.
  • Sometimes I happen to need dozen of clones and I'm running out of storage.

I wonder if there's a way to create a VM that saves only the delta (difference) since the delployment out of the source machine. That way each new VM's filesize should be 100MB at most, and creating it will be much faster.

I've heard that VMWare View is using this concept. Is such a thing possible for ESXi as well?

I'm using ESXi 4.1 with VSphere 4.1.

Thanks!

virtualization vmware-esxi vmware-view

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You might want to check this out:

    http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9202

    It's a script that allows you to create as many linked clones as you need in ESXi.

    • 3

  2. VMware's VDI can do this I believe. It just takes a base VM, and creates clones of it for every new VM that you need. Disk space used is minimal.

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