vmware documentation needed: document the usage and use cases for ephemeral disks in vCenter/ESXi context

[Shawn Hartsock]

The term "ephemeral disk" means something special in the VMware vSphere, vCenter, and ESXi contexts. The use case and usage of ephemeral disks should be documented from a vCenter stand-point. Similar to the "linked-clone" versus "full-clone" and the use of "datastores" as both shared or local storage ... this concept clashes with other common VIAdmin (VMware Infrastructure Administrator) concepts and will likely be an area that OpenStack administrators will need to discuss with VIAdmins so it would be good to document the use of virtual disks and disk related terms between the two platforms so users can request help intelligently or ask for the right kinds of changes to vCenter from their IT staff.

To document:
* ephemeral disks and vSphere
* linked-clone versus full-clone see: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_clone_typeofclone.html

[Andreas Jaeger (jaegerandi)]

Shawn, are you still working on this?

[Lana (loquacity)]

This information needs to be included on this page: http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/config-reference/content/vmware.html

However, after some research, I'm not clear enough on how ephemeral disks are different in a VMWare/VSphere context to be able to document this. Needs more info. Can you point to a VMWare KB article or a blog post maybe?

L