This improvement does not diminish when many virtual machines are deployed at once. In the next test, the same template was used but instead of one virtual machine being deployed, 8 virtual machines were concurrently deployed from the template. This process was automated using the following basic PowerCLI script.
for ($i=0; $i -le 7; $i++)
{
New-vm -vmhost <host name> -Name "<VM name prefix>$i" -Template <template name> -Datastore <datastore name> -runasync
}
The preceding script deploys all 8 VMs to the same target datastore. It took 4.5 minutes for the deployment of 16 VMs with XCOPY disabled to complete and it only took 35 seconds when XCOPY was enabled. For an improvement of about 8x. A single VM deployment improvement (as revealed in the previous example) was about 5x so the efficiency gains actually improve as deployment concurrency is scaled up. Non-XCOPY based deployment characteristics (throughput/IOPS/duration) increase in an almost linear fashion along with an increased VM count, while XCOPY-based deployment characteristics increase at a much slower comparative rate due to the great ease at which the FlashArray can handle XCOPY operations. The chart shows this scaled up from 1 to 16 VMs at a time and the difference between enabling and disabling XCOPY. As can be noted, the difference really materializes as the concurrency increases.
Figure 12. XCOPY vs. Non-XCOPY Concurrent VM deployment time