How can I specify where my local developer's service fabric cluster is created?

Question

My problem: I am learning Service Fabric, and doing simple tutorials, and the local cluster is filling up my C drive. I run the projects in Visual Studio. It first creates a cluster in a folder SfDevCluster. That takes up 842 MB of space. Then it deploys the services and web api sites. Remember, these are trivial tutorials with almost nothing in them. Now, I notice that I have a folder with a Size = 1.22 TB and Size on Disk of 9.4 GB. I'm not sure how to interpret that. But it consumes the remaining space on my C drive and sets off alarms. I have other drives with lots of space. I would love to specify that those be used. Is there a way to do that with the service fabric cluster used by Visual Studio? Or is there a way to constrain the overly ambitious size allocations? And if you understand this, can you explain what these unusual folder sizes mean? In the old days, I would have a hard drive with lots of space. But now, my developer machine has a much faster, but more expensive SSD drive, and space is at a premium. So I need more control of the cluster location.

Answer 1

You can set up a local cluster pointing to a non-system drive by running the DevClusterSetup script in PowerShell. You can find the script under %programfiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Service Fabric\ClusterSetup\. The command line you want is:

.\DevClusterSetup.ps1 -PathToClusterDataRoot <desired_app_and_data_location> -PathToClusterLogRoot <desired_tracelog_location>

If you already have a cluster running, this script will remove it and create a new one (note that this will delete any deployed apps and their data). Once you have the new cluster running, Visual Studio will automatically use that when you deploy locally.

As for the file sizes - this is mostly due to the log file used for replication of state stored in reliable collections. A large, sparse file is preallocated up-front, which is why you see a difference between size and size on disk. We are planning to make these values configurable so that they can be dialed down on local clusters.