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jimbee
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Disk consumption for thin provision on storage \ thick provision VM guest

We typically thin provision our disk in vSphere but now want to thick provision a few servers. We have 15 TB left of unsubscribed disk capacity on our Pure Array and are getting about 2:1 dedup. A server needs 33 TB of thick provisioned disk. If the VM guest server is thick provisioned but not using all of the space allocated to it, will the disk space on the SAN array be consumed since it was thick-provisioned or not until data is added to the disk on the VM guest?

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daphnissov
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CORRECTION (thank you, André): You *can't* have a datastore that's 15 TB etc...

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daphnissov
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If the VM guest server is thick provisioned but not using all of the space allocated to it, will the disk space on the SAN array be consumed since it was thick-provisioned or not until data is added to the disk on the VM guest?

The Pure array won't consider that as largely "used" capacity because there is nothing written to those extents. Making it thick eager zeros is another story. But keep in mind with either that you still need your vSphere data store to be able to accommodate that 33 TB from a metadata perspective. You can have a VMFS datastore that's, say, 15 TB in size and provision a thick disk on top of 33 TB. You'll have to present a dramatically over-sized LUN from Pure which can accommodate that size from a metadata perspective.

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daphnissov
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CORRECTION (thank you, André): You *can't* have a datastore that's 15 TB etc...

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