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rbirri
Contributor
Contributor

thin vmdk support by VMware

I want create thin vmdk from the CLI on SAN storage.

Does VMware officialy support this feature ?

I know it will be in ESX4.0 but what about 3.5 ?

I've been searching information regarding thin vmdk support but nothing relevant yet.

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

Yes a disk type of thin is supported with ESX v3.x and used quite often.


Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky
VMware Communities User Moderator
====
Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
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Edward L. Haletky
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rbirri
Contributor
Contributor

OK. Thanks for your time.

Does thin vmdk have a impact on performance ? I am planning to deploy about 300 VM with a consolisation ratio of 50. Do I need to worry about performance issue regarding thin vmdk ?

What is the easiest solution to deploy thin VM ? When I deploy a new VM from a thin VM Template, the resulting VM is thick. And converting thick to thin each time I create a new VM is a bit cumbersome.

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Lightbulb
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Thin vmdk's do have a larger I/O cost, as the vmdk file grows as needed and that growth operation generates extra I/O. You generally need not worry about this as long as you are provisioning storage correctly.

As to how best to deploy 300 thin VMs, you could store the VMs on a NFS which defaults to thin provisioning Smiley Happy

Seriously though, you should be able to script something out and I would imagine if you Google you might find someone already has.

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seniord
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have been investigating thin provisioning of VM Templates and found that many people are advising that VMware only supports thin provisioning on NFS if the array supports thin provisioning. If a VM template is created as a thin disk and then provisioned (or cloned) using VirtualCenter, the disk is automatically converted to thick...

http://communities.vmware.com/message/989524#989524

http://communities.vmware.com/message/842777#842777

http://communities.vmware.com/message/843159#843159

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