vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-storage-guide

Chapter 25 Storage Thin ProvisioningThin provisioning is the fastest method to create a virtual disk because itcreates a disk with just the header information. It does not allocate or zeroout storage blocks. Storage blocks are allocated and zeroed out when theyare first accessed.NOTE If a virtual disk supports clustering solutions such as Fault Tolerance,do not make the disk thin.You can manually inflate the thin disk, so that it occupies the entireprovisioned space. If physical storage space is exhausted and the thinprovisioned disk cannot grow, the virtual machine becomes unusable.Create Thin Provisioned Virtual Disks in the vSphere Web ClientTo save storage space, you can create a virtual disk in thin provisioned format. The thin provisioned virtualdisk starts small and grows as more disk space is required. You can create thin disks only on the datastoresthat support disk-level thin provisioning.This procedure assumes that you are creating a new virtual machine. For information, see the vSphere VirtualMachine Administration documentation.Procedure1 Right-click any inventory object that is a valid parent object of a virtual machine, such as a datacenter,folder, cluster, resource pool, or host, and select New Virtual Machine.2 Select Create a new virtual machine and click Next.3 Follow the steps required to create a virtual machine.4 On the Customize Hardware page, click the Virtual Hardware tab.5 Click the New Hard Disk triangle to expand the hard disk options.6 (Optional) Adjust the default disk size.With a thin virtual disk, the disk size value shows how much space is provisioned and guaranteed tothe disk. At the beginning, the virtual disk might not use the entire provisioned space and the actualstorage usage value could be less than the size of the virtual disk.7 Select Thin Provision for Disk Provisioning.8 Finish virtual machine creation.You created a virtual machine with a disk in thin format.What to do nextIf you created a virtual disk in the thin format, you can later inflate it to its full size.View Virtual Machine Storage Resources in the vSphere Web ClientYou can view how datastore storage space is allocated for your virtual machines.Storage Usage shows how much datastore space is occupied by virtual machine files, includingconfiguration and log files, snapshots, virtual disks, and so on. When the virtual machine is running, theused storage space also includes swap files.For virtual machines with thin disks, the actual storage usage value might be less than the size of the virtualdisk.VMware, Inc. 247