vmdk not showing true size on datastore

[JDMils_Interact]

vCenter 6.7u3n

I have a VM called DFS02 which has a 9TB disk attached and is formatted as Thick Provision Eager Zeroed so by my knowledge, when I look at the vmdk on the datastore, it should show as 9TB.

However, when I look at the datastore from the web GUI, I see the following:

DFS02-ctk.vmdk, size:4,608.5KB, type:File
DFS02.vmdk, size:1,393,589,802KB, type:Virtual Disk

When I run the Get-HardDisk command in PowerShell, it shows the following:

StorageFormat   : EagerZeroedThick
Persistence     : Persistent
DiskType        : Flat
Filename        : [mydatastore_0007] DFS02.vmdk
CapacityKB      : 9663676416
CapacityGB      : 9216
ParentId        : VirtualMachine-vm-123456
Parent          : DFS02
Uid             : /VIServer=mydomain\julian@myvcenter:443/VirtualMachine=VirtualMachine-vm-123456/HardDisk=2002/
ConnectionState :
ExtensionData   : VMware.Vim.VirtualDisk
Id              : VirtualMachine-vm-123456/2002
Name            : Hard disk 3

When I look at the datastore from the host, I see this:

[root@myhost04:/vmfs/volumes/123456789-12345678/DFS02] ls -l
total 1393594456
-rw-------    1 root     root       4719104 Aug 17 12:46 DFS02-ctk.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     9895604649984 Aug 18 03:20 DFS02-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           679 Aug 18 00:38 DFS02.vmdk

My question is why does the GUI not show the correct vmdk size?

[a_p_]

I guess that it's simply a GUI issue caused by some kind of overflow in a variable.

André

[JDMils_Interact]

And from the host, why does the 9TB vmdk show as 9TB when it's Thin Provisioned on the server? I thought a thin provisioned disk would show as smaller than the allocated size?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I assume that when you say "from the host" you are talking about the CLI.

Thin provisioning is a file system feature (comparable with sparse in Linux). Commands like ls show the provisioned size for such files, but you can run e.g. ls -lisa which also shows the used disk space in kB in the second column.

André

[JDMils_Interact]

That's exactly what i needed- thanks!