Thin Provisioned VM disks sizes still showing thick

[m80arm]

Hi All,

I have a VM with one disk which is set to 205gb (This was a P2V performed a while back) see image 1.  I've SvMotioned the VM to another datastore (Same block size of 1mb and VMFS v 3.31) yet the VMDK doesn't shrink see image 2.  When checking within the OS it shows that only 124gb is in use so in theory my .vmdk file should only be ~124gb.

Environment is running ESXi 4.1 on backend FC shared storage.  HW version is 7.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Michael

[m80arm]

Hmmm - Just found the following so I'm giving it a try:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1696468

Basically involves SvMotioning the VM to a datastore with a different blocksize.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Note: This discussion was moved from the VMware ESXi 4 community to the VMware vSphere Storage community.

Check out http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/02/18/blocksize-impact/ as well.

Good Luck!

[m80arm]

Thanks vmroyale,

I've read Duncan's article before and hence the reason I SvMotioned the VM from a 1mb blocksize datastore to another 1mb datastore so that it wouldn't use the old datamover.  I'll wait and see what happens after this SvMotion.

Michael

[m80arm]

So I've now migrated the VM from a 1mb Datastore to an 8mb Datastore and it's still the same size.  I can't seem to reclaim that 80gb worth of free space.

Any other ideas?

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

Did you use sdelete or shrink initially?

[m80arm]

No, is this actually necessary?

I've done this before and normally SvMotion sorts it out.

Michael

[vmroyale]

I think it would depend on the amount of blocks that need to be zereod out, and this would obviously differ with each workload.  Try one of these utilities and then do the Storage vMotion.  I suspect that will make a difference with this particular VM.

[m80arm]

The Shrink option within VMtools is disabled (http://www.thelowercasew.com/vmware-tools-shrink-option-unavailable) but I'll take a look at sdelete.  It will take me a while to clone the VM prior to testing so I'll get back to you.

Thanks for your help.

Michael

[m80arm]

sdelete has worked.

Cloned the VM, ran sdelete with the following paramter (sdelete.exe -c c:), waited for it to finish and the SvMotioned the VM to another datastore with a different block size.  VMDK is now the correct size.

A full post about this can be found here:

http://www.virtualizationteam.com/virtualization-vmware/vsphere-virtualization-vmware/vmware-esx-4-r...

Thanks everyone for your help.

Michael

[Ofer1790]

HI, Im not shure how this thin disks are working, so I'll ask, hope this right place...

Im using GhettoVCB to backup my VMs. One VM is Thin provisioned. When I do backup with Thin disk type Provisioned size is 1GB, used is 600MB. Backup shows same results. I want to copy this backup to my Win Desktop to save it here. After copying it to Win, size is 1GB. Is this how its supposed to be working, or am I doing something wrong? When i use compression, size is 220MB. But max size of VM to compress is 8GB, so compressing VMs isnt solution for bigger VMs.

Im using ESXi 4.1 update 1, ghettoVCB LAST_MODIFIED_DATE=2011_05_22. Image is Debian 6 Squeeze. I have only 1 ESXi host, i backup on local datastore and then SCP it out (like 6Q)