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xmasin
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 6.5 thin provisioned VM disks

Hello,

my customer is running ESXi 6.5 on Soyoustart server with two independend disks. For VMs are available two datastores with VMFS5 filesystem.

Now I'm instaling OpenSuSE Thumbleweed linux in VM and I'd like to use Linux raid for data protection. So I have created two disks with same size, one disk is located in datastore1 with other vms files and second disk is located in datastore2 in folder, what I have created for this VM, disks size is 20 GB. Both disks are set as thin provisioned. Durring instalation I have created standard linux raid partitions on both disk and merge them into raid1 disk, where is system instalated. When I look into datastores I see, that vmdk file in datastore1 has size about 3 GB, but vmdk file in datastore2 has size 20 GB. Can enyone explain me, why second disk si provisioned with full allocated size?

Thank you
Radek Masin

2 Replies
continuum
Immortal
Immortal

I assume the expected result was a size of 3gb on both datastores ?

If yes then there are 2 easy explanations:

- something along the process of creating the raid1 in Linux wiped one drive with zeroes while not doing that for the other one.

- the larger version was created as thick provisioned in the first place


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xmasin
Contributor
Contributor

Today I finally found, where is the problem. After instalation linux raid utility start disk synchronization and synchronize disk based on bitmap policy. So it synchronize whole space of disk even if is unused and fill unused space with zeroes. But for vmware it means, that space is alocated.

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