vSphere 5.1 Unable to change VMDK from Thick Provisioned Eager Zeroed to Thin provisioned after cloning VM

[Bandolero]

Moving from one datastore to another and selecting thin provisioning for the vmdks, does not changes the disk type from Thick Provisioned Eager Zeroed to Thin provisioning, No error is generated

[vuzzini]

Hello Bandolero,

Have you followed the below mentioned steps ?

To convert a virtual machine base disk from thick to thin provisioning by changing the datastore and using offline virtual machine migration:

Note: This process requires more than one datastore. If only a single datastore exists, you can clone the virtual machine to a destination machine with thin provisioned disks instead of migrating.

1. Power off the virtual machine.
2. Right-click the virtual machine, and click Migrate.
3. Click Change datastore.
4. Click Next, and select a datastore that is not the same as the current datastore.
5. From the dropdown, select the Thin Provision virtual disk format.
6. Click Next, then Finish. You can monitor the progress of the conversion in the Tasks and Events view in vCenter Server.

Follow the below steps to do Storage vMotion from vSphere Webclient for vSphere 5.5:

1. Right-click the virtual machine and select Migrate.
   
   
   1. To locate a virtual machine, select a datacenter, folder, cluster, resource pool, host, or vApp.
   2. Click the Related Objects tab and click Virtual Machines.
      
      
2. Select Change datastore and click Next.
3. Select "Thin Provision" for the virtual machine's disks and click Next
4. Select a virtual machine storage policy from the VM Storage Policy drop-down menu, click Next
5. Select the datastore location where you want to store the virtual machine files and click Next.
6. Review the information on the Review Selections page and click Finish.

[Bandolero]

Yes, but the VMDK still is Thick Provisioned Eager Zeroed. I did a VM-Move from VMware vSphere PowerCLI with the same results

[vuzzini]

Note: Disks are converted from thin to thick format or thick to thin format only when they are copied from one datastore to another. If you choose to leave a disk in its original location, the disk format is not converted, regardless of the selection made here.

[Bandolero]

This issue goes beyond the basics, I am looking at similar postings and this issue has not been solved. The audience for this question is more towards someone who has faced this problem and has been able to solve it.