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virtual-machinevmwareesxi

Thin vhdk considered as thick in my esxi

I have selected thin HDD during creation of VM. but when i check the size of '.vmdk' file in Linux side, it shown actual tick size. for example : when i assign 250 gb, and i check the size of '.vmdk' , is exactly 250. anyone knows why esxi consider it as thick ?

thanks

Solution

  • If you create thin provisioned disk for your VM, it means allocated space (in your case 250GB) is not fully commited only to this VM in VMFS file system and unused blocks of this capacity might be shared with other VMs. You can also check the documentation:

    For a thin virtual disk, ESXi provisions the entire space required for the disk’s current and future activities, for example 40GB. However, the thin disk commits only as much storage space as the disk needs for its initial operations.

    On the other hand, guest OS Linux is not aware of VMFS thin disks, therefore your Linux file system (ext3,ext4 or whatever you use) sees entire capacity of 250GB.

    In ESXi you can check actual disk usage of thin disk by running stat command against your .vmdk file.