Deleting old VM's

[Fizzmo]

Hi,

Quick question. I have 3 old VM, each has a 100GB disk [was used for testing]. I am about to delete the VM's from disk but I was asked if the deletion is quicker if the information within the disks is emptied out; is it?

Thanks.

[Jerpoulissen]

Hi Fizzmo,

At my point of view it should not matter

[Fizzmo]

Just catching up. Deleting the 3 VM's was quick. No difference between empty VM or a VM full of old data.

[AureusStone]

I presume that when you delete a VM, vSphere marks the sectors as available on the VMFS datastore.  Zero filling the space would take a long time, add a lot of load to the SAN and would make data recovery not work.