ESXi

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  • 1.  Disk space

    Posted Jun 16, 2022 05:38 PM

    On an ESXi 6.7 hypervisor (free version) I created some VMs.
    All the disks are thin.
    I made some tests and created snapshots for each VM.
    Later I deleted all the snapshots and consolidated the disks.
    The space used by disks is now close to the size of the disks and far greater than the used space I see from Windows from inside the VMs.

    So, for example:

    • a VM have a thin disk of 60 GB
    • the space really used on the disk is 20 GB
    • after consolidating the disks, the size of the .vmdk file is close to 60 GB.

    How can I reduce the space used by the disks to the real size of the used disk space?



  • 2.  RE: Disk space

    Posted Jun 16, 2022 07:05 PM

    Make sure that the VM does not have any active snapshots, then zero out unused disk space from within the guest OS (using e.g. sdelete for a Windows guest), and finally shutdown the VM and run vmkfstools --punchzero your.vmdk to punch out zeroed blocks.

    André



  • 3.  RE: Disk space

    Broadcom Employee