converting thick provisioning to thin provisioning

[Mintz]

How do I go about converting from a thick provisioned harddisk to a thin provisioned one. I converted a VM from VMware workstation and it has used far more real disk than expected.

Regards

Eugene Gill

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Check out this blog for one way to do it. The latest version of the VMware Converter should also work.

Good Luck!

[bulletprooffool]

In vSphere, it is as simple as right click machine, click migrate, select storage . . and select 'thin provision' - it will convert thin to thick / thick t thin as part of the migration for you.

[Mintz]

In vSphere, it is as simple as right click machine, click migrate, select storage . . and select 'thin provision' - it will convert thin to thick / thick t thin as part of the migration for you.

i'm sorry. I'm a total newbie here.

In vSphere client? If I right click on the machine I don't see a migrate menu. Note I'm using the free license.

[bulletprooffool]

Ah - sorry no migrate in the frrebie version - sorry

You'll have to use the command line tools

[kburden0002]

Personally what I did was to create a new hard drive of same or larger size that was thin provisioned. I then booted Clonezilla and copied from the thick drive to the thin drive. After this completed I removed the thick provisioned drive from the machine. (I only removed it from the machine, not delete from disk.) I then moved the thin provisioned drive to 0:0 on scsi position and started it up to make sure everything worked fine. If everything worked I went into the data browser and deleted the old thick provisioned hard drive. Most of my machines took about 30 minutes total to convert over, but the machines I was converting were only 20gb machines. I started with 11gb free then ended up with 112 gb free.

*NOTE* Make sure you have to extra space to do the cloning to start out with. After you move a few machines you don't have to worry about this any more.

[AndreTheGiant]

Without vCenter Center you can use VMware Standalone Converter 4.x or vmkfstools (you have to enable SSH or console access to your ESXi).

See also:

Andre

[crescendas]

I notice that without vCenter, thin provisioning option won't even show

up on paid version of ESX and ESXi Server. It has to be done thru the

vCenter. Else you have to use the commandline to do this.

[admin]

Here is an script called makeThin that does the conversion of virtual disks in a clean and precise way, with warnings and review after each conversion, for as many VMs as you want.

http://vmutils.blogspot.com/2011/06/automatic-thinning-of-virtual-disks.html

It can also give you a summary of storage savings.