How do you convert a thin provisioned disk to thick?

To change vmdk from Thin to Thick provisioning

  1. Power off the virtual machine.
  2. In vSphere Client, right-click the virtual machine in the inventory.
  3. Click Edit Settings to display the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box.
  4. Select the appropriate hard disk in the Hardware list.

Does thin provisioning affect performance?

Thin-provisioned disks have no performance overhead due to fragmentation and perform similarly compared to a fully-allocated and zeroed thick disk (eager zeroed thick).

What is disk thin provisioning?

Thin provisioning allocates disk space to users on demand based on how much space they need at any given time. As a user saves more data, they take up more of the disk; when they delete data, their portion shrinks. Divisions on physical storage are virtual and flexible rather than determined in advance.

How do I shrink a VMDK disk?

Press Control-Alt-Delete to login to the virtual machine. Select Disk Management, and select the partition you need to shrink. Right Click the Volume/Partition to shrink, and select Shrink. The above dialogue will briefly appear whilst the file system is queried.

Can you shrink a VMware disk?

Shrinking a disk is a two-step process: When a virtual machine is powered on, you shrink its virtual disks from the VMware Tools control panel. You cannot shrink virtual disks if a snapshot exists. To remove the snapshot if one exists, choose VM > Snapshot > Snapshot Manager > Delete.

How do I shrink a thin provisioned virtual disk VMDK?

What I am thinking of is:

  1. migrate the VM to another datstore, selecting “Thick Provisioned” as the target format.
  2. run sdelete within the guest OS to zero out unused blocks.
  3. migrate the VM back to the original datastore, selecting “Thin Provisioned” in the wizard.

Which two options can change the thin provisioned disk?

Use Storage vMotion of the running VM to the same datastore and select Thick Provision. Power off the VM, locate the VMDK disk in the Datastore browser, right-click that and select Inflate. Use Storage vMotion of the running VM to another datastore and select Thick Provision.

Can I change from thick to thin provisioning VMware?

It’s possible to convert a thick provisioned disk to a thin one in a bunch of clicks thanks to the powerful vSphere Web Client, for VMware ESXi virtual machines. It’s also possible to perform the inverse operation. Before starting, VMware doesn’t allow to directly convert a thick provisioned disk to a thin one.

Why do I need a thin provisioned disk?

Having thin provisioned disk is usually no longer a performance problem so it is a valid design choice even in production. A common issue with thin disks is that the size will grow when required, but never shrink. When you require the capacity only once you might want to get it back from the virtual machine.

Can a thin disk be provisioned in ESXi?

A virtual disk that immediately occupies the entire provisioned space is a thick disk. ESXi supports thin provisioning for virtual disks. With the disk-level thin provisioning feature, you can create virtual disks in a thin format.

How does thin provisioning work in data center?

Thin Provisioning reserves capacity dynamically to keep slightly ahead of the written data. By doing so, Thin Provisioning gets rid of the upfront capacity reservation, thereby unlocking and freeing the capacity that would otherwise be reserved upfront and trapped within Thick Provisioned volumes.

How much storage does a thin disk need?

However, the thin disk uses only as much storage space as the disk needs for its initial operations. In this example, the thin-provisioned disk occupies only 20 GB of storage. If the disk requires more space, it can expand into its entire 40 GB of provisioned space.