StratoGen recently deployed vCloud Director v1.5 to offer our clients an even better user interface to manage their virtual datacentres. v1.5 is quicker at a multitude of tasks but one of the biggest improvements has been in the time taken to deploy a virtual machine from a template. Previously when provisioning a virtual machine, the entire template disk was replicated causing a significant wait whilst the data was copied to your new virtual machine disk. A new provisioning method is available in v1.5 called linked clones, whereby a delta disk is created with a link back to the original template disk. Only changes between your virtual machine and the template master disk are stored resulting in a much quicker provisioning time.
You can of course choose to provision a full clone should you wish.
Fast provisioning can be found in the Virtual Datacentre properies. A tick in the ‘enable fast provisioning’ box is all that is required.
Provisioning other resources are also significantly faster with this upgrade.
StratoGen were one the first VMware hosting providers globally to build out a platform based on vCloud Director and the product continues to go from strength to strength. These performance improvements are a welcome addition to an already powerful and sophisticated application.
For further information please download the vCloud Director v1.5 user manual from http://www.stratogen.com/support/downloads/vcd_15_users_guide.pdf
