6.0

n
Create a Virtual Disk in the vSphere Client on page 93
When you create a virtual disk, you can specify disk properties such as size, format, clustering
features, and more.
n
Use an Existing Virtual Disk in the vSphere Client on page 94
You can use an existing disk that is configured with an operating system or other virtual machine
data. This choice allows you to freely move the virtual hard drive from virtual machine to virtual
machine.
n
Add an RDM Disk to a Virtual Machine in the vSphere Client on page 95
You can store virtual machine data directly on a SAN LUN instead of storing it in a virtual disk file.
This ability is useful if you are running applications in your virtual machines that must detect the
physical characteristics of the storage device. Mapping a SAN LUN allows you to use existing SAN
commands to manage storage for the disk.
Create a Virtual Disk in the vSphere Client
When you create a virtual disk, you can specify disk properties such as size, format, clustering features, and
more.
For detailed information about disk types, see the vSphere Storage publication.
Procedure
1 On the Create a Disk page of the New Virtual Machine wizard, select the disk size.
You can increase the disk size later or add disks in the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box.
2 Select the format for the virtual machine's disks and click Next.
Option Action
Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
Create a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the
virtual disk is allocated during creation. Any data remaining on the
physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand
at a later time on first write from the virtual machine.
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
Create a thick disk that supports clustering features such as Fault
Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time.
In contrast to the flat format, the data remaining on the physical device is
zeroed out during creation. It might take much longer to create disks in
this format than to create other types of disks.
Thin Provision
Use the thin provisioned format. At first, a thin provisioned disk uses only
as much datastore space as the disk initially needs. If the thin disk needs
more space later, it can grow to the maximum capacity allocated to it.
3 Select a location to store the virtual disk files and click Next.
Option Description
Store with the virtual machine
Stores the files with the configuration and other virtual machine files. This
option makes file management easier.
Specify a datastore or datastore
cluster
Stores the file separately from other virtual machine files.
The Advanced Options page opens.
4 Accept the default or select a different virtual device node.
In most cases, you can accept the default device node. For a hard disk, a nondefault device node is
useful to control the boot order or to have different SCSI controller types. For example, you might want
to boot from an LSI Logic controller and share a data disk with another virtual machine using a
BusLogic controller with bus sharing turned on.
Chapter 10 Creating a Virtual Machine in the vSphere Client
VMware, Inc. 93