VMDK files expanded

[nchoudhary]

Hi there

I have a strange problem here. I have a Red Hat Linux box which is provisioned with 3 disks. HDD1(Thinly provisioned) holding root partition and allocated space on it is 10GB inside the OS but it is allocated 60GB at VMWare level. For some reason the VMDK file is grown up(provisioned) to 60 GB but inside the OS when I run df -h it is showing 3GB used out of 10GB.

I do not take any snapshot so there is no way it is because of that.

Can Linux OS can cause HDD1 to grown at VMWare level without affecting internal partition?

Please help

thanks in advance.

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

where do you see the 60GB? Please provide a screen shot of the Datastore Browser window showing all the VM's files with their sizes and time stamps.

André

[nchoudhary]

Hi Andre

Thanks for your reply. Please find the screenshot attached. It was allocated on SAN.

Thanks for your help

[Tsjo]

The disk has an additional 45G provisioned if the VM ever grows that large, but it's only using around 11G.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

As mentioned by Tsjo,the "Size" is what's physically used by the VM and the "Provisioned Size" is the size you defined when you created the thin provisioned virtual disk. The "Provisioned Size" you see in the VM's Summary tab is the maximum size the VM could use on the datastore, not what it's currently using.

André

[nchoudhary]

Thanks guys for your help. But checking records it was only assigned 10 GB. This provisioned space has come from no where. We noticed this because yesterday I received error that VMDK is out of space and it cannot start the virtual machine. We ran out of space on datastore and only HDD1 is showing provisioned space but internally it is 70% free on the partition.

[a_p_]

This provisioned space has come from no where.

The provisioned size  does not change automatically, but only manually. From the provisioned size of the first virtual disk (the one in question) it looks like this was created with 45GB and then someone decided to only use 10GB and create a second disk with 35GB!?

Unless this host is part of an HA cluster and memory is not overprovisioned, you could set a memory reservation for the VM. This will result in a reduced size for the .vswp file which is created when the VM is powered on, effectively freeing up disk space to be able to power on the VM.

André

[nchoudhary]

Thanks Andre. You and Tsjo been helpful.