expand a eager disk in eager format and not lazy zeroed?

[de2rfg]

Hi,

in the past we used thin or lazy disks for our vmdk's, since the migration to IBM SVC storage we use eager zeroed disks. I noticed today that the disk type changes when I expand the vmdk by x GB  from eager to lazy.

I found the following article.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/06/extending-an-eagerzeroedthick-disk.html#comment-469573

"When extending a VMDK which is EagerZeroedThick, the extended part is only LazyZeroed."

After reading the article, there seems to be no way to expand a eager disk of a powered on VM in eager format (just keep the existing format). The added disk space is always of lazy zeroed and the type of the vmdk/disk changes from eager to lazy.

Do I miss something? This issue seems to exist for a couple of years now, are there any plans to solve this issue? What options do we have? IBM's recommendation is to use eagerly zeroed vmdks and for a lot of VM the requirement of the application is also eagerly zeroed disks. Do we now have to shut down every VM that has to be expanded? That would be a big issue for us.

[vickey0rana]

There is no resolution till yet by VMware. Anyone tested this in ESXi6 ?

[vickey0rana]

@ de2rfg : Sorry to ask you because I lost my lab few weeks ago.

if you do sVmotion of VM or Disk, that helps or still disks remains inconsistent ?

[vickey0rana]

Hey, Look what I have found in VMware KB 1035823  for same ... although it is for clustering but valid for your original question where it says:

It is necessary to repeat these steps after extending an existing eagerzeroedthick virtual disk with the vmkfstools -X command or by increasing the disk size using the vSphere Client.

Steps are mentioned in KB, KB showing this valid till ESXi5.5 so need to validate this for ESXi6. Hope this KB helps.

~Ravinder S Rana

[de2rfg]

Power down the virtual machine using the target VMDK virtual disk file.

That's a bummer. I've to test a svMotion.