Comments on: How to thin provision an exsiting VMWare disk on ESXi without virtual center

By: Insufficient disk space on datastore (ESXI) - webhostingtalk.nl

Insufficient disk space on datastore (ESXI) - webhostingtalk.nl — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:21:09 +0000

[...] de images op thin provisioning. Scheel een pak. http://www.slashzero.com/2008/10/how…irtual-center/ __________________ GlobalServe BVBA – Connecting Your Business And Infrastructure Hosted Exchange [...]

By: aleixsr

aleixsr — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:03:28 +0000

Thank you very much, I was crazy with this option until I read it!

By: abx21

abx21 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:24:32 +0000

Yes, do an ls -lsh, the first column shows the actual size of the file.

By: Derek Bush

Derek Bush — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:44:24 +0000

To show the difference use ls -s
The “-s” or “–size” option shows the blocks actually used.

By: abx21

abx21 — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:40:15 +0000

Its a sparse file. Kind of like lastlog on a linux system. At least thats what I think.

By: Jay Rogers

Jay Rogers — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:05:43 +0000

I tried this tip and another from another blog but never see a size difference in the files.

Starting in the vmfs LUN I want to create the file I have tried:
vmkfstools -i disk1.vmdk disk1thin -d ‘thin’ -a lsilogic
and
vmkfstools -c 10G -d thin disk1.vmdk

both show the same size:
[root@esx3srv0101ph hdslun14a]# ls -l
total 2240
-rw——- 1 root root 10737418240 Dec 10 13:32 disk1-flat.vmdk
-rw——- 1 root root 397 Dec 10 14:00 disk1thin
-rw——- 1 root root 10737418240 Dec 10 13:59 disk1thin-flat
-rw——- 1 root root 398 Dec 10 13:32 disk1.vmdk