Environment:
VMware Horizon 7.5
vSphere 6.7
Created a parent VM - disk usage size about 27 GB when done.
VM Hardware: Hard disk 1 is 75 GB, thin provisioned, sitting on a VMFS 6 datastore.
Take snapshot 1 for use with linked-clones - disk usage size in the vSphere Web Client shows about 27 GB.
Take a second snapshot 2 with some updates and applications - disk usage size snapshot size is about 1.5 GB.
If I delete/commit snapshot 1, the storage usage goes up to almost the entire hard drive size - 74.82 GB.
I can do the sdelete/shrink disk to reclaim the disk space, but why would committing a snapshot that is no where near the size of hard drive cause the hard drive to expand to its full size?
Thanks for any help.
If what you explain is really the case, thenI'd consider this a huge bug, and you should open a support case with VMware.
The maximum growth of a thin provisioned virtual disk when deleting a snapshot should not exceed the snapshot's size.
How did you verify the virtual disk sizes?
The most reliable way to do this is to run ls -lisa from the command line. This command will show the provisioned size in bytes, as well as the used disk space in kB (second column).
André
Hello Andre,
To verify, I browsed the files on the datastore via the vSphere Web console. I also SSH'd into the host, navigated to the vm on the datastore, and ran:
ls -lh *.vmdk
and then to verify actual usage,
du -h *.vmdk
Thank you,
Paul Murphy