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jitla1971
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Is Disk Thick or Thin Confusion

HI All

I have a strange issue.

We have a several vm's who's disk I have been told are thick, but everything I can see suggests they are thin.

Within the datastore of one of the disks it show the following: Size and Provisioned, that to me shows the disk is thin.

disk.JPG

Not sure why the size is showing all the same as provisioned, whilst the OS which is Linux states only 52GB is being used out of the provisioned 100GB

When your right click on the vmdk you get the option to Inflate the disk, this also points to the disk being Thin Provisioned.

As per my understanding, the inflate option should be greyed out, if they vmdk is thick provisioned.

When you right click the vm and select edit it also shows the disk as being thin

thindisk.JPG

Has anyone seen a issue similar to this before or can help clarify if my argument of the disk being thin is correct or not.

Thanks

Jit

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vThinkBeyondVM
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As per your screen shots, disks are THIN provisioned. If disk is THICK you do not get "Provisioned size" column  (ref-first screen shot). I assume you are using VI client.

Also you do not get "inflate option" if disk is THICK. You are correct.

Message was edited by: vVision


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Vikas, VCP70, MCTS on AD, SCJP6.0, VCF, vSphere with Tanzu specialist.
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Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. I am solely responsible for all content published here. Content published here is not read, reviewed or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily represent or reflect the views or opinions of VMware.

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vThinkBeyondVM
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As per your screen shots, disks are THIN provisioned. If disk is THICK you do not get "Provisioned size" column  (ref-first screen shot). I assume you are using VI client.

Also you do not get "inflate option" if disk is THICK. You are correct.

Message was edited by: vVision


----------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks & Regards
Vikas, VCP70, MCTS on AD, SCJP6.0, VCF, vSphere with Tanzu specialist.
https://vThinkBeyondVM.com/about
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. I am solely responsible for all content published here. Content published here is not read, reviewed or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily represent or reflect the views or opinions of VMware.

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Rubeck
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Has anyone seen a issue similar to this before...

I see something similar from time to time..

22-05-2014 12-18-49.png

The disk lives on a NetApp NFS datastore where no VAAI is involved.. So no way it can be Thick Eager. The discriptor file for that .vmdk also has ddb.thinProvisioned = "1" value there, so I'm sure it's thin..

Never bothered to look further into this, but I've seen this on ESX 4 and ESXi 5.x...


/Rubeck

  

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jitla1971
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Thank you Vicky I was sure I wasn't going crazy.

I think we could be suffering from white space issue, where by deleted data within the thin provisioned disk is now showing correctly.

Once again thank you for your help and proving im not going crazySmiley Happy

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jitla1971
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Thank you Rubeck much appreciated.Smiley Happy

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jitla1971
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Rubeck how can I check the disk descriptor file to see if it has a value of 1???

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Rubeck
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By using SSH or console access if available..

~ # cat /vmfs/volumes/NA_DS02_DDS/myVM/myVM.vmdk

# Disk DescriptorFile

version=3

encoding="UTF-8"

CID=70b16dd4

parentCID=ffffffff

isNativeSnapshot="no"

createType="vmfs"

# Extent description

RW 167772160 VMFS "myVM-flat.vmdk"

# Change Tracking File

changeTrackPath="myVM-ctk.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base

#DDB

ddb.toolsVersion = "8295"

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "7"

ddb.deletable = "true"

ddb.longContentID = "461f74a63fe02a2029a755d770b16dd4"

ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 9a 56 87 aa 7c-a6 ab 5a 96 f3 58 ac b3"

ddb.geometry.cylinders = "10443"

ddb.geometry.heads = "255"

ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"

ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"

~ #

/Rubeck

jitla1971
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thank you very much, that help further add proof to my argument.:smileydevil:

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