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guy_rubinger
Contributor
Contributor

transfering a huge thin provined vm disk to a smaller size datastore

hi guys

I have a question ,I have a vm with 3.2TB disk size and we need to upgrade our storage so I need to move the vm to other data store ,the vm provisioned size is 400gb and I have the sufficient free space in another data store for the provisioned size but not for the full size.

I tried to change data store when the vm is on the migrate wizard said "the vmdk I larger then the max disk size ...." so my question is if i shutdown the vm will i be able to migrate her by the thin size?

:slightly_smiling_face:

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Tom_NL
Contributor
Contributor

What is the block size of your source and destination datastore. I think your destination datastore blocksize is too small.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I think is spot on. From the screen shot it looks like you have a mix of VMFS3 and VMFS5 datastores. For VMFS3 the block defines the maximum file (e.g. virtual disk) size on the datatore. Your options are to either migrate the VM to another datastore or - if all hosts are already running ESXi 5.x - to upgrade your datastore(s) to VMFS5.

André

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guy_rubinger
Contributor
Contributor

thank you both of you for the quick answer, but you didn't answer my question which is :when I will migrate the vm to other datastore (keeping the thin format) will she move by her actual size (389gb) of by the size I allocated(3.2 tera) ?

I need to know if I need to make another 3.2 tera lun .

I need to upgrade the datastore to vmfs 5 and and format it for 4 k block size ( for 2 tera vmdks right?)

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

The file size of the .vmdk (virtual disk) will remain the same, unless you manually select to convert the disk format in the migration wizard.

André

guy_rubinger
Contributor
Contributor


even due like you can see in the photo above I have a lun with 500 gb free I cant move the vm I get the error insufficient disk space.

will I able to move her with her thin sized disk if I shut her down?( the thin sized is 389 gb and I have a lun with 500gb  free space )?

and thanks and after I upgraded to vmfs 5 all error disappeared except "insufficient disk space".

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

you need a 8 MB blocksize if the target LUN is VMFS 3
you can ignore blocksize if the target LUN is VMFS 5

to move the vmdk use
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/current-path/name.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/new-path/name.vmdk -d thin

using datastorebrowser may not create a thin.vmdk on the target - so use vmkfstools instead - it is predictable


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