An end-to-end analysis of file system features on sparse virtual disks
Ruijin Zhou, Sankaran Sivathanu, Jin-Pyo Kim, Bing Tsai, Tao Li · 2014
Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is now an emerging area drawing considerable attention in enterprise computing. Software-Defined Storage (SDS), as a key element to enable the SDDC concept, is considered one of the most disruptive storage technologies in modern times. SDS introduces a variety of novel features and functionalities thereby changing the traditional view of the storage stack. In VMware's ESXi virtualization platform, several sparse virtual disk formats have been implemented to support critical features for SDS such as virtual machine (VM) snapshots, Fault-Tolerance (FT), thin provisioning and linked clones. Each virtual disk format supports unique features that may incur complex interactions with other layers of the storage stack such as guest file systems and storage devices.