Templates with RDMs

[Michelle_Laveri]

I have a custom who does not use virtual disks for the boot disk of his VMs... he uses RDMs for both his windows boot disks and data?

Does anyone else do this?

If so what is the impact if uses templates...???

Are templates really just a virtual disk feature?

Regards

Mike

[VirtualNoitall]

Hello,

You are out of luck for VMware templates. Assuming they have a shared storage solution they could create luns that they use for cloning to replicate the same general principal with RDM.

We don't use RDM because we are not interested in using SAN technologies like clones and replication. Even then though it would be a hard sell. There is very little in the way of a performance difference and I would hate to give up the portability of the vmdk\vmfs approach.

[Michelle_Laveri]

Hello,

You are out of luck for VMware templates.

So just to be 100% RDMs and Template - are totally incompatiable???

therefore the only way to clone, would be using the SAN's replication facility...?

Regards

Mike

[VirtualNoitall]

Hello,

Yes, that is my experience based on reading numerous different sources on the subject; in the lead up to our large scale VI 3.0 implementation

[letoatrads]

We don't use RDM because we are not interested in

using SAN technologies like clones and replication.

Even then though it would be a hard sell. There is

very little in the way of a performance difference

and I would hate to give up the portability of the

vmdk\vmfs approach.

You know - I'm pretty much in lock step with you on this aspect, I think I've simply gotten spoiled with the ease of VMFS. Yet this week I ran into a situation where RDM's became an essential piece of the puzzle for me. In a previous solution we had a CMS backend storage area for our websites, using the CMS system we would publish our web content to an NFS share that load balanced Apache webservers would all mount and share out. Everything works fine and dandy- it was just slower than X-Mas. We virtualized this, made the NFS mount an RDM and attached it to the backend server and the apache webservers....man what a difference.

Sorry- back to your regularly scheduled RDM and templates discussion -

[VirtualNoitall]

Hey,

Bang on. I think you go VMFS unless there is a very compelling reason not to. It sounds like you came across one and I know there are others ( SAN replication, SAN backups, etc ).

[Michelle_Laveri]

So...... just to get back to my original question...

RDMs are incompatiable with templates???

Regards

Mike

[VirtualNoitall]

Correct. Templates are for VMDKs.