Thin Provisioning-how to change to that after the vm is built as well as +'s and -'s?

[macpiano]

Early on I built the vm's with a fixed size but now want to change a couple of them to thin as I don't think they will ever use that much space and it is too hard to know what is going to happen 3 years from now.

Do I have to clone it and on the resurrection change the disk to thin?

What are the pluses and minuses of thin provisioning?

thanks

Gary

[WaffleSniffer]

Hi Gary

This document details how to convert a vmdk from thick to thin format, but imo, it's not particually well written, though it does give you the basic steps involved.

However, my preferred way, assuming that you have the appropriate licensing and available storage, you can just change the disk from thick to thin using Storage vMotion. Just select the 'Thin provisioned format' option when prompted for the Disk Format in the Migration Wizard. Naturally this can be done with the VM running.

Hope this helps

Adam

[WaffleSniffer]

oops.. missed off the pluses / minuses part..

The pluses are obviously that you initially consume less space on the storage, and there is lots of documentation (www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf for example) to show that the performance is not affected to any great degree.

However, on the down-side, this format is not supported for FT enabled systems, and does require more strict monitoring of your storage to ensure that you don't run out of space.

Eric Siebert wrote a good article on this... might be worth a read.

Cheers

Adam