ESXi 6 - Physical disk space - where did it go

[jdegon]

I've been using VMWare products 10+ years, most of that being VMWare Workstation.  On my laptop (500G HD), I currently have over a dozen virtual machines from server 2012 to Windows XP for testing.  I also have dozens of snapshots.  If I look at my physical drive space used, all the above is taking 330G of space.

I decided to buy a dedicated device and create an ESXi environment that would more closely replicate my customers environments.  I have a 500G HD with 16G memory on an i7 platform.  I downloaded ESXi iso, created a bootable USB and installed.  Connected with vSpere Client and started installing VMWare Guests.  After my 6th VMWare guest, I only had 65G of HD space left.  I installed the following

4 Server 2012 - 60G HD Each

1 Windows 8 - 40G

1 Windwos 7 =- 40G

Even if all the virtual HD were pre-allocated (which I do not believe they are), the above would only = 320G.

If I look at vSpere, it states I have a capacity of 458G with only 65G left.

So, question, it does appear that its allocating all the space for the HD and with some overhead, I can see where the numbers above comes from, but one of the advantages of Virtualization is to share resources.  It there a setting in ESXi that does NOT pre-allocate all the space when creating a virtual guest.

[RichardBush]

What is the datastore size ?

Try running rvtools against the host to get a full break down of disk usage.

[paolomic]

Are you thick provisioning your disks?  Do you have snapshots on them, snapshots will grow the VM exponentially.

[TobiasArvastsso · Accepted solution]

When you are working with Workstation it will create the disk files as thin provisioning. The default in vSphere is to create the disk as Thick provision lazy zero. It will allocate all the space of the disk if you dont have a VAAI api disk system. When creating environments on your computer and have ESXi installed on it make sure you check thin provision when when setting up servers or it will fill up fast.

You will have the option to chose thin provision when you select the size of the disk when you create vms in ESXi. There are 3 options thick provision lazy zero, thick provision eager zero and thin provision.

[jdegon]

Thats it, thanks

[jdegon]

Another question, can I change it on existing VM guests or do I need to rebuild all my VMs?

[paolomic]

You can.  2 Ways

1:  Use VMware converter and thin the disk when you clone it

2:  Use Virtual Centre (if you have it installed), clone VM, select Thin as disk type

[microkid]

3) Use the CLI: vmkfstools -i input.vmdk outputvmdk -d thin

Then remove the old VMDK from the VM and attach the new one. Done.