Thin Provisioned Disks

[davidjerwood]

Does anyone know how I can detect if a vm is running using a thin provissioned disk or a fully allocated thick disk.

Also is there an easy way I can search for this on all of my virtual machines, approx 300 ?

Would like to search for a much info as possible if I can, ie how much has been allocated etc.

[AntonVZhbankov]

By default all vmdk's are thick in ESX 3.5 unless you use View linked clones or created vmdk manually as thin.

Checked VI Toolkit and vmkfstools if some tool can report, but both tools can create thin disks only. You can't just query if this particular disk is thin or not.

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VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[davidjerwood]

Even on NFS Storage ???

David Jerwood

Microsoft Services Team

IG Group | Friars House | 157-168 Blackfriars Road

London  SE1 8EZ | www.iggroup.com

Switchboard: +44 20 7896 0011

Direct Line:  +44 20 7573 0070

david.jerwood@igindex.co.uk

[MattG]

I would bet that the guys in the Powershell forum could whip up a script to achieve this.

-MattG

[davidjerwood]

http://www.vcritical.com/2009/01/finding-thin-provisioned-virtual-disks-with-powershell/#more-514

David Jerwood

Microsoft Services Team

IG Group | Friars House | 157-168 Blackfriars Road

London  SE1 8EZ | www.iggroup.com

Switchboard: +44 20 7896 0011

Direct Line:  +44 20 7573 0070

david.jerwood@igindex.co.uk

[lamw]

You have the option of looking at the VI API to query this information and looks like someone has done this in Powershell with the previous command, if you're on a single host you could also write up a quick bash script to look at all the descriptor files and see how the disk was allocated.

For thin provisioned you'll see something like in the .vmdk descriptor file:

ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"

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William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009

VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: