Storage VMotion impact on LUNs in same Volume

DMA0211NETAPP — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:23:32 GMT

If you use Storage VMotion to move a VM to a different FC LUN in the same deduplicated Volume, does the VM get expanded. This would be in a VI3.5 environment.
What about the cloning process? As typical cloning thickdisks all VMs by defult in 3.5, it would most likely not be deduplicated until the next time a-sis runs. We realize there are other tools and other ways to clone VMs. This is a specific case scenario.

Re: Storage VMotion impact on LUNs in same Volume

amiller_1 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:19:25 GMT

DMA0211NETAPP wrote:

If you use Storage VMotion to move a VM to a different FC LUN in the same deduplicated Volume, does the VM get expanded. This would be in a VI3.5 environment.
What about the cloning process? As typical cloning thickdisks all VMs by defult in 3.5, it would most likely not be deduplicated until the next time a-sis runs. We realize there are other tools and other ways to clone VMs. This is a specific case scenario.

#1 - Yes, it gets expanded...however that's really the correct terminology. VMware just does it's normal Storage vMotion but since it doesn't have any idea that there's deduplication under the covers it will read all the blocks and then write them to the new location (since from VMware's perspective it's a different LUN, i.e. a new location).

#2 - Same answer basically -- VMware doesn't know about deduplication so "Deploy from Template" will always take extra storage until the next dedupe run. The alternative here is using the Rapid Clone Utility -- quite good stuff but does have some requirements around it.

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2009/09/now-available-netapp-rcu-21.html

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Storage VMotion impact on LUNs in same Volume

Re: Storage VMotion impact on LUNs in same Volume