Differences in provisioned disk space

[911Eric]

Hi, I'm relatively new to VMware and am having some trouble understanding how provisioned space works in that I see several different numbers listed for the same VM that differ greatly.

I'm trying to essentially create some new VM's that have the same specs as our production VM's; I'll be using the same amount of cores, memory and hard disk space.  What I can't figure out is what was actually provisioned to these servers when they were created.

When looking at the summary page of the VM it shows under resources 402.74GB provisioned storage but when I go into edit the settings of the VM and look at the virtual disk settings it shows 100GB as the provisioned size with a type of Thick lazy zeroed (all of this is greyed out).  If I login to the Windows guest that is running and look at the disk it shows a total capacity of 107GB.

Why would a thick provisioned disk type with 100GB set in the VM settings show as 402GB provisioned when looking under resources on the summary tab?

Thanks in advance!

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the communities.

Do you have snapshots on this VM?

[911Eric]

Thank you for the fast reply!

Yes it does appear that we have about 5 snapshots of the current VM I am looking to replicate.  So is that to say that if you configured a VM for 100GB of space in the settings, the provisioned number in the summary will likely go above that due to things like snapshots and the amount of space the VM files are using on the host/storage?

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

Yes, each snapshot can consume the same amount of space as the base disk.

[911Eric]

That makes sense.  Didn't think of that when I was over here scratching my head wondering why they were so different.

Thanks for your help!