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Gain more free space with storage Thin Provisioning


Thin provisioning can save you a LOTs of SAN space. You know that storage space on a SAN its expensive. Insdead of thinking how to get enough money to buy larger SAN or upgrade, why not instead migrate your VMs using a VMware Converter with thin provisionned disks?

If you are using VMware Workstation, to test stuff, you should know that thin provisioning is present in VMware Workstation since long time..

Here is a little picture if you still do not understant what thin provisioned disk looks like. On the image you can see that the size of the VM on the left is using 10 Gigs on the SAN(but when you look at your VM the disk size inside – it shows that the system has 20 gigs.) It’s a magic….   -:)

Thin provisioning

Vladan SEGET

Vladan is an Independent consultant, vExpert, VCP and owner of this website. This website ESX Virtualization started as a bookmarking site, but very fast found itself many readers and supporters. Feel free to network via Twitter @vladan

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  • http://www.van-lieshout.com Arnim van Lieshout

    You can also use storage vmotion to thin provision a vm on the fly.

    -Arnim

    • Vladan SEGET

      Great Info Arnim,

      I realy like this feature of vSphere 4 and I think that for existing ESX 3 Customers this could be the point the balance for an upgrade for vSphere 4.

  • Tarz

    I just want to say, that if anyone else did find out that copying (storage vmotion) from 1mb to 8mb block sized datastore makes the thin disk full size. If it is vmotioned back it is small again.

    Anyone?