svMotion thin provisioning question

[tlyczko]

Upon upgrading to vSphere I svMotioned several VMs to thin-provision them.

I noticed that the allocated and used storage changed noticeably for each host.

Allocated storage particularly decreased below the quantity set for the initial 'thick' storage w/in ESX 3.5.

Only 2 VMs so far have been moved this way.

Upon noticing the above allocation changes, I increased the allocated storage by a few GB for each VM.

Is what I did the correct procedure for newly svMotioned VMs w/in vSphere??

I ask because I have not yet migrated production/important VMs to vSphere and I don't want to affect their ability to accept more data, they are database and email servers etc.

Thank you, Tom

[mittim12]

So what your saying is that your provisioned space changed when you moved? I would expect the used space to but not the overall disk size. How did you perform the storage vmotion? Was it through the plugin or remote cli?

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[tlyczko]

I used the vSphere client GUI to migrate the VM to another host and to another datastore, choosing thin-provisioned in the process for the storage.

svMotion is built into the vSphere client now.

For example, one VM was originally 9 GB and got shrunk to 4-some GB, I increased it after that to 6 GB.

Thank you, Tom

[firestartah]

As mittim says the overall disk size shouldn't change at all just the actual used storage. Changing this isn't bad per say but you need to be careful of over provisioning your storage too much and it runs out of space.

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Gregg Robertson, VCP3,4 , MCSE, MCSA, MCTS, MCITP

[a_p_]

I used the vSphere client GUI to migrate the VM to another host and to another datastore, choosing thin-provisioned in the process for the storage.

svMotion is built into the vSphere client now.

Did you SVMotion or migrate the VM?

André

[tlyczko]

Andre, please re-read my sentence.

I migrated the VMs, choosing to both move them to a new host and to a new datastore, during which one can choose to thin-provision the storage.

Thank you, Tom

[mittim12]

You are correct it is built it but still there aren't a lot of options in the process. You pick your format and then the datastore and in theory it should move it over without making any changes to Provisioned storage and only making changes to used storage. I did a test with one of our development VM's with a C:\ of 20 and a D:\ of 30. The sizes stayed the same but utilized space dropped by 35 GB.

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[tlyczko]

Mittim12, your result is what I expected to happen.

What did happen was that a VM initially provisioned to 9 GB thick in ESX 3.5 brought into vSphere became:

4.50 provisioned

4.29 not-shared

4.29 used

I have since changed provisioned to 6.50 GB

A similar change happened with another VM though I can't recall the original disk size.

The one above is a Linux VM, the other VM is a Windows XP VM.

I would have to create another VM and test again etc. to verify all this...

I wondered if other people had similar experiences...

Thank you, Tom

[mittim12]

Yeah, it's not something that I have seen nor would I expect it but then again I haven't converted a large number of thick disk over to thin. I would definitley do some more testing before moving anything production.

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