HI Folks - my experience with vSphere is that you can't migrate a VM with eager thick VMDKs into an NFS datastore without it converting the disk to thin. We experienced this when we migrated thick VMs into our Nutanix ccluster NFS datastore.
That said, we also have another cluster using NFS datastore hosted by NetApp and I just powered on a VM with eager thick VMDKs, and we have not applied any VIBs to the host that would add some capability. All that was done was restore the thick VM from backup to the NFS datastore and it powered up no issues.
Can someone provide some rationale as to why I need to change the format during a migration, but when powering on from a cold state after restore I was able to power on a VM with eager thick VMDK on this NFS datastore?
Thanks in advance for helping solve this
Interesting. Can you confirm that the restored .vmdk is indeed "thick"?
From that I read (didn't do this myself yet) the Netapp VAAI plugin needs to be installed.
see e.g. https://kb.netapp.com/Advice_and_Troubleshooting/Data_Storage_Software/vStorage_APIs_-_Array_Integra...
André
Interesting. Can you confirm that the restored .vmdk is indeed "thick"?
From that I read (didn't do this myself yet) the Netapp VAAI plugin needs to be installed.
see e.g. https://kb.netapp.com/Advice_and_Troubleshooting/Data_Storage_Software/vStorage_APIs_-_Array_Integra...
André
Thanks Andre, I should have mentioned this, it is exactly why I posted this.. because it is eager thick and it is on NetApp which yes the plugin is supposed to be installed. I'm using vSphere 6.5 even, older hardware that doesn't support 6.7 and up. and yet when I was expecting the VM to NOT start until I could change the format with a quick cold migration it just started right up... I'm puzzled. I have a call with our NetApp resource tomorrow so I will also ask him about this to see what he has to say. But this really is a question for VMware forum or support.
Hi Andre - I logged into the host this morning and ran some exscfg-advcfg to pull details if the plugin is actually installed and working, it is. I quickly learned from some quick searching that the plugin can be installed using the array tools without interaction of a vSphere admin per se. This is how the VAAI plugin made it to our cluster.