I’ve recently come across a great use case for VMware thin provisioning which I felt worthy of sharing , not so much as a “how to” guide as I’m sure that thin provisioning has been covered before , but more of a proven use case.

 

The Latest and greatest version of Cisco Secure ACS can be shipped as an appliance where it will colour co ordinate with all of the other “cornflower blue” devices in your datacenter ( what is the official name of Cisco Blue anyhow ? )

 

 

And a lovely little box it is too , but underneath the covers , its just an x86 server and ripe for hosting on your virtual infrastructure. Being the forward thinking chaps that Cisco are , they make ACS available as a VM , which is fantastic , but they mandate that the VM has the same hardware spec as the appliance. Such so that if you attempt to install the software onto a VM that does not meet those requirements it will go into evaluation mode.

 

I have no doubt that there will be situations and environments that will require all 500GB of drive space that the ACS appliance requires & will also require 4GB of Memory and dual vCPU. However being a fan of the concept of one size not necessarily fitting all I was asked how I could deploy the appliance into an environment that had enough drive space to hold the required logs , but not the full 500 Gb. Concerns were also made about allocating that much RAM to the VM.

 

One thin provisioned volume later and I have a fully functioning ACS VM that will meet the clients requirements without having to purchase additional storage.