Delete Snapshot make the flat disk grows in size

[Luis_Molina]

Hi all!!

I have a vm with a disk in thin provisioning, the size of the disk is 5 TB, after an snapshot and removal of the snapshot the size of the disk increase to the top, but windows shows the disk without problems. I made the sdelete process, repeat the snapshot and removal and this behavior is the same the disk and luns is full.

Have anyone saw this problem?

[continuum]

I read your post 5 times and I still do not understand why you are surprised.

To me this looks exactly like what we would expect.

[Luis_Molina]

Why? After I reclaimed the space with sdelete vmware show me an used size of 200 GB, not the full 5 TB,

[continuum]

Sorry -I cant follow.

All I can say is that if you delete a snapshot it is expected behaviour that a thin flat vmdk grows in size.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

According to the output of the ls -l command, the virtual disk has been inflated to almost its fully provisioned size.

Running sdelete from within the guest OS is not always a good idea. It may zero out unused disk space from the guest OS's point of view, but increases the thin .vmdk disk space usage, because it writes to each block.

Assuming that there the VM has no more active snapshots (no vmname-00000x.vmdk files), you may try to run the vmkfstools --punchzero 01-2.vmdk (with the VM powered off) to reclaim zeroed out disk space from the .vmdk file.

In any case make sure that you have an up-to-date backup before doing this!

André

[Luis_Molina]

Thanks! After the vmkfstools I migrated the vm and the space was a lot less!!