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
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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.
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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.
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 ![]()
Seriously though, you should be able to script something out and I would imagine if you Google you might find someone already has.
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
