eagerzeroedthick ESXi 4.1

[JMulkey]

I am not a SAN guy so I may be a bit wrong in how I am asking this question.

We are in the process of replacing our SAN. The San guy here to do it is asking me if my LUNs are setup to be eagerzeroedthick.

I do not see any documents in setting up a LUN to be eagerzeroedthick. I see documents talking about the VMDK being set to eagerzeroedthick.

My Question is can a LUN be set to eagerzeroedthick or is it the VMDK that is set to eagerzeroedthick.

I am assuming it is the VMDK. If so what is the easy way to set the VMDKs to eagerzeroedthick.

In the process of upgrading the SAN I will be StorageMotioning all my VMs. If I can make the change at the time I do the StorageMotion would be great.

Thanks for any help.

[MauroBonder]

Hello,

eagerzeroethick is defined on VMDK. You can do this migration normally.

"

Name

Description

eagerZeroedThick

An eager zeroed thick disk has all space allocated and wiped clean  of any previous contents on the physical media at creation time.  Such disks may take longer time during creation  compared to other  disk formats.   NOTE: This value may be removed before release if Satyam confirms that  remote vmkfstools can implement this option by using preallocated  followed by an explicit call to ZeroFillVirtualDisk_Task

"

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Mauro Bonder - Moderator

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[JMulkey]

Ok so I am reading that I need to put a check mark in the "cluster" setting and have the VMDK as Thick.

Or do i need to use the command line to fix 500 VMDK files?

[MauroBonder]

Sorry. Clarify to me.

you´d like create a VMDK for virtual machine that will run cluster microsoft ??

[DSTAVERT]

I would get together with your SAN guy to fully understand the question frorm their perspective. Since eagerzeroedthick will zero out the space for each vmdk it does put additional strain on the SAN during creation. If you are currently using thin disks it will mean you need more space to accomodate normal usage expansion of the VMDK. There is probably no reason for conversion to eagerzeroedthick if you are currently using regular thick or thin VMDKs. From the SAN perspective there are probably reasons to go to thin provisioned disks either at the SAN or ESXi controlled. Talk to the SAN guy.

[JMulkey]

Sorry,

I need to move 320 VMs to new SAN.

I was asked to have them all set to eagerzeroedthick on the new SAN.

I am trying to find the easy way to do this.

There are 500+ VMDKs

Going forwared with new VMs I think I found a way for the VMDK to be set with eagerzeroedthick by Checking "Support Clustering Features such as Fault Tolerance" when creating a new disk.

[a_p_]

There are some options to convert the vmdk's to eagerzeroedthick. One option is to do it manually using the vmkfstools command line utility (see e.g. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011170) and another option - which may apply to you since you are moving to a new storage system - is to leverage Storage vMotion which can do this for you.

André