Is there a way to restrict all deploying vms to use thin provision only?

[Pugnator]

We have quite a large environment with huge number of users who deploys VMs from templates. While you deploy a VM you can select which kind of provision to select. We want to force this selection to be "thin provision" only.

How can we archive it? Thanks in advance

[vThinkBeyondVM]

1. If you are using NFS datastore with NO hardware acceleration supported, your default deployment would be THIN only.  There will not be any other option you will have.

2. If you are using VMFs or NFS of any type, first deploy a VM with thin provisioned disk to it (any number) then you can create template out of that VM. Finally use the same template to deploy any number of Vms at any host. Make sure that template should be available on shared DS with all users.

Ref

1. ;VMware vSphere 5.1

2. vSphere Documentation Center

3.  If you are using VMFs or NFS of any type, first deploy a VM with thin provisioned disk to it (any number of disks) then you can create OVF file out of that, use same OVF for VM deployment. Here every user can locally save this OVF file or can be maintained at remote location.

PeteNetLive - KB0000562 - VMware - How to Import and Export OVF Files

VMware Workstation 10 Documentation Center

4. You can create onc script by using powerCLI or VMware SDK which creates the VM where disk added is thin provisioned. Everytime, user execute this script, VM with only thin disk would be provisioned. Let me know if you need help on this.

------------------------------------------------------------------

if it is useful, plz award points as correct or useful