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PowerStore thin clones make block-based copies of a volume or volume group and can also be created from a snapshot. Because the thin clone volume shares data blocks with the parent, the capacity usage of the child volume mainly consists of the delta changes from after it was created. Thin clones are advantageous in a vSphere environment because a VMFS datastore full of virtual machines can be duplicated for testing purposes, all while consuming less storage. For example, if a vSphere administrator has to clone a multi-terabyte database server for a developer to run tests, the VM can be isolated and tested. Also, the VM only consumes blocks that changed.
Within the PowerStore architecture, thin clones have several advantages for storage administrators: