Description:

This paper presents a performance study comparing sparse virtual disk formats in VMFS, namely VMFSsparse and SEsparse, using the thin virtual disk format as the baseline. The performance results are from the Iometer micro-benchmark (on two setups with different classes of storage), and two real world application domains: Big Data Analytics and VDI. We show that the SEsparse virtual disk format performs on par with, or better than the VMFSsparse format (depending on the workload), while also having the ability to reclaim storage space freed up by the guest.