Thin Provisioning concern

[ChrisLopes]

Hi,

Let say I have 1 TB of disk space on local hardisk.

Let say I create 4 virtual machine that uses 512 GB virtual hardisk each using Think Provisioning which is more than 1 TB, what is the implication in this scenario for thin provisioning?

[byoung111]

The only issue I can see is that your lun could eventually run out of space and your VM's will stop working.

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

In most cases you don't use 100% of disk space, and very often disk space is allocated just for future very big amount of space is not used. Thin provisioned disks are not preallocated, they grow with each written data block, so actual disk usage equals allocated space. Disk size in this case is just a limit, disk won't grow bigger beyond this limit.

If your actual usage is more than 1TB thin provisioning won't help you. Thin provisioning lightens the burden of disk allocation planning, you don't need to calculate 39GB or 41.5GB for VM is required, you just create 100GB thin disk and forget about it.

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