Most people have never heard about NetApp’s Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU) for VMware. This tool is the magic behind the famous YouTube video that show how NetApp can very quickly create and deploy a very large number of Virtual Desktops, while using very little disk space on the filer. With desktop virtualization being hot right now this is a great tool to get to know and use. The tool is available on the NOW tool chest (a free website for NetApp customers and partners).

In this video below, NetApp demonstrates the cost savings of their zero disk cost provisioning and data deduplication software. 5000 Virtual Desktops provisioned in minutes, while only taking a little over 10GB storage.