Thin Disks

[scotty_p]

I just set up a vm with thin disks. I filled up all the space on the hard drive and watched the vmdk increase in size. I then deleted 10gb of files, but the vmdk did not shrink. Shouldn't the vmdk go down in size when data is deleted? Do I have to manually shrink it to reclaim the space?

Thanks,

Scott

[mittim12 · Accepted solution]

You would have to manually shrink the disk to reclaim the space. Check out this link on a way to do that.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1409908

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[DSTAVERT]

When data is deleted from within the OS the data is not actually removed from the disk and ESX has no way to know about the fact. The tools like sdelete zero out the deleted data allowing the shrink tool to shrink the to the used size of the vmdk.

A shrink tool would be VMware converter or storage vmotion or some other tool to recreate the disk.

[KamilAzmer]

Thin only grow with your file size but when you already put a data and removed/delete it, it's not will free up the vmdk disk size. you have to shrink it first by using sdelete or VMware Tools (Shrink Option) after sdelete you need to do SVMotion or vmdk clones to reclaim the space. It have to do manually.

Correct me if i'm wrong.

[scotty_p]

That's a bummer. I thought it would automagically reclaim it.

Thanks for everyone's help.