What happens when source or master VMDK is deleted after flexclone?

[bsnyder27]

I'm just getting started in utilizing flexclone in our VMware environment.  It works as designed very well.

We use NFS datastores and a test rapid clone of 15 VMs using the VSC plugin took just one minute start to finish.

So given that scenario, what happens if the source VM is deleted or the OS is updated later on in order to redeploy those 15 VMs?  What specifically happens to the blocks that the cloned VMs are referencing?

[aborzenkov]

Blocks are kept for as long as they are referenced by clone.

[bsnyder27]

That seemed to be the implication from what I've seen in documentation.

So the blocks are essentially orphaned then by the master and left until all pointers from the cloned vmdk files have been removed?  Seems sensible.

[aborzenkov]

What do you mean "orphaned"? vmdk still exists in clone and can be accessed there.

[bsnyder27]

Likely a poor word choice.  Just thinking that when deleting the master vmdk, the blocks that it referenced are then 'orphaned' by the deleted master vmdk but still referenced by the pointers from the clone vmdks.

Those blocks are still active though and reside until all child clones have been deleted in which those 'orphaned' blocks get dumped off to snapshot land.