When trying to convert some Linux vmdks from thick to thin they are not actually shrinking in size. I have done this many times with various ESXi 4.x servers, VMs, and types of storage but I have not seen before. Has anyone seen this happen?
In this case I tried to thin-convert first by vMotioning the VM to a different datastore and selecting thin provisioning. When that didn't work I ssh'd to the ESXi server and used vmkfstools -i <thick>.vmdk -d thin <thin>.vmdk. I tried this on two different Linux VMs and no luck.
Server details:
VMware ESXi 4.0 build 294855 on an HP server
Local storage. 4 LUNs: 2x RAID5 - 273 GB, 558 GB and 2x RAID10 - 273 GB, 558 GB
VM1 details:
originally created as a new VM
Red Hat Enterprise Linux EL ES 4 update 6, kernel 2.6.9-78.0.1.ELsmp x64_64
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext3 19G 11G 7.7G 57% /
Zero-filled via: cat /dev/zero > zero.fill; sync; sleep 1; sync; rm -f zero.fill
VM2 details:
originally created via VMware Converter (P2V)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux EL ES 4 update 6, kernel 2.6.9-67.0.15.ELsmp i386
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext3 5.0G 398M 4.3G 9% /
/dev/sda5 ext3 2.0G 1.4G 494M 75% /home
/dev/sda8 ext3 116G 40G 71G 37% /srv
/dev/sda6 ext3 2.0G 1.4G 549M 72% /tmp
/dev/sda3 ext3 5.0G 2.4G 2.4G 50% /usr
/dev/sda2 ext3 5.0G 372M 4.4G 8% /var
Zero-filled via: dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20971520
Thanks,
Aaron
