Dedupe and VMware Best Practices

[mfeightner]

What are the best practices / recommendations for using dedupe with VMware ESX LUNs?  Can dedupe be used together with VMware thin provisioning, or should only one of these technologies be used?

[jooss]

You certainly can and will want to use them together.

Our best pratices paper on VMware cover this in very good detail.

The link to those Best Practices is:

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3428.pdf

I think the info that you're looking for starts on pages 53 and 56.  Let us know that works.

Cheers,

Rick

[amiller_1]

Yes -- completely complementary (VMware thin provisioning and dedup).

Both thin provisioning and dedup can help with the "empty space" inside most VMDK's (as empty space dedups quite well after all) but only dedup will handle the duplicate files across multiple vmdk's (OS data, etc.).

And....if possible I do strongly recommend looking at NFS for VMware environments. For dedup in particular, it makes using the freed up space trivial.

http://communities.netapp.com/message/8822