Instant Clone

Instant Clone is a new feature that was previously developed as Project Fargo. It is intended to speed-up massive virtual machine deployments. This especially applies to virtual desktop infrastructures and big data setups. VMware claims that using this technology to deploy hundreds of virtual machines is only a matter of minutes, as it is up to ten times faster than the previous mechanism, which took much longer.

Virtual machines that are instantly cloned, primarily share the disk and memory data with the dependent virtual machine, which reduces the resource usage. Differing disk and memory resources are stored as delta, using a Copy-On-Write mechanism. The following figure explains the difference between Fast Provisioning and the well-known Full Clone mechanism.