VMworld 2015/Deploy VMs by Forking

Deploy Hundreds of VMs Instatly via Forking

Alan Renouf (VMwarE) and Li Zheng (VMware)

http://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/

http://virtu-al.net/

Ready VMs

• Fast provisioning
• Instant Boot
• Low Memory
• Low CPU

All available with instant clone

Instant Clone

VMware Instant Clone is now at your fingertips with the updated PowerCLI Extensions fling! - VMware PowerCLI Blog - VMware Blogs - https://blogs.vmware.com/PowerCLI/2015/08/vmware-instant-clone-now-fingertips-new-powercli-extensions-fling.html

How does it work?

• splits work into preparation (expensive) and fork (cheap) paths

Preparation:

• boot parent, launch applications, load libraries into memory
• freeze parent state
• break large pages
• pre-create and register any number of child VMs

Fork phase:

• child inherits parent VMs memory state (COW Copy on Write), device state (checkpoint), disk state (delta disk)

Once powered on, forked child becomes a full linked clone (instant clone can share memory state, where linked clone only shares disk state)

Workflow

New-VM -Name Photon01 -ResourcePool "clusterr1"

$parent = Get-VM -Name Photon01

New-Snapshot -VM $parent -Name BeforeChildren

Enable-InstantCloneVM -VM $parent -GuestUser "root" -GuestPassword 'vmware'
        -PreQuiesceScript "c:\instantclone\pre.sh" -PostCloneScript "c:\instantclone\customize.sh"

$parent = Get-InstantCloneVM Photon01

$configSettings = @{
   'ipaddress' = '...';
   'netmask' = '255....';
   'gateway' = '...';
}

$child = new-InstantCloneVM
` -ParentVM $parent
` -name "clone01"
` -ConfigParams $conifgSettings
` -pPersistent

$child | Start-VM