User guide

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sum of the storage required by each virtual machine. For example, if each virtual machine is 20 GB in size and
there are supposed to be 1000 virtual machines in the solution, it would require at least 20 B usable data on the
shared storage.
Thin provisioning, data deduplication, and FlexClone® are the critical components of the NetApp solution and
offer multiple levels of storage efficiency across the virtual desktop OS data, installed applications, and user data.
This helps customers save on average 50 percent to 90 percent on the cost associated with shared storage
(based on existing customer deployments and NetApp solutions lab validation). NetApp is the only storage vendor
that offers block-level data deduplication for live virtual machines, without any negative tradeoffs.
3.4.3 Thin Provisioning
Thin provisioning is a way of logically presenting more storage to hosts than physically available. With thin
provisioning, the storage administrator is able to utilize a pool of physical disks (known as an aggregate) and
create logical volumes for different applications to use, while not pre-allocating space to those volumes. The
space gets allocated only when the host needs it. The unused aggregate space is available for the existing thinly
provisioned volumes to expand or for use in creation of new volumes. For details about thin provisioning, refer to
NetApp TR 3563: NetApp Thin Provisioning.
Figure 23. Traditional and thin provisioning
Figure 24. Increased disk utilization with NetApp thin provisioning
100GB Actual Data
Thin Provisioning
Storage On Demand
100GB Actual Data
Traditional Provisioning
Pre-allocated
Physical Storage
400 GB Allocated
& Unused
400 GB Available to
Other Applications