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14 PS Series Template Volumes and Thin Clones: How and When to Use Them | TR1063
4. Assign users to folders. Different environments will have different permission structures, but in this
example, each developer is only given permissions to their folder. This way, when a developer
launches the vSphere client UI and logs in, as Developer1 for example, they will only see the folder
and VMs that are in Developer1 folder and this will keep them segmented from the other developers.
The virtual machine power user for the folder will allow the developer to power on and power off the
VM as well as change settings.
Step 2: Configure thin clone on SAN
Now that the vSphere environment is prepared, it is time to create the thin clone environment. This example
has a client VM, a web server VM, and a database server VM on a single datastore. This is the production
environment that will be thin cloned and then provisioned out to the developer environments.
This example assumes the developers want to work on production data. We can create a clone of the
production datastore in one of two ways:
 From the Group Manager UI, select the volume that has the VMs and clone it.
 Use Dell Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) to create a clone of the datastore. If using VSM to create a
clone of the environment, remove the cloned VMs from inventory before moving to the next step.
Once the volume with the production virtual machines on it is cloned, follow the instructions in this document
to convert it into an offline template volume (see section 2). Once the volume is offline and is a template
volume, verify that there are no static connections to the volume in the iSCSI initiator on the ESXi servers and
rescan to prevent error messages showing up on the SAN.
You can also follow these same instructions by creating a new volume, presenting it to ESXi as a new
Datastore, populating it with VMs, then offlining the volume and turning it into a thin clone template.
Step 3: Provision thin clones
Now that the volume has been converted into a thin clone template, it is time to provision the thin clones. It is
important to note that ESXi will only resignature one clone or snapshots of a volume. If provisioning more than
one thin clone (for example, to support multiple developers), the process must be performed one thin clone at
a time.