6.0.1

Thin provisioning is the fastest method to create a virtual disk because it
creates a disk with just the header information. It does not allocate or zero
out storage blocks. Storage blocks are allocated and zeroed out when they
are rst accessed.
N If a virtual disk supports clustering solutions such as Fault Tolerance,
do not make the disk thin.
You can manually inate the thin disk, so that it occupies the entire
provisioned space. If physical storage space is exhausted and the thin
provisioned disk cannot grow, the virtual machine becomes unusable.
Create Thin Provisioned Virtual Disks
To save storage space, you can create a virtual disk in thin provisioned format. The thin provisioned virtual
disk starts small and grows as more disk space is required. You can create thin disks only on the datastores
that support disk-level thin provisioning.
This procedure assumes that you are creating a new virtual machine. For information, see the vSphere Virtual
Machine Administration documentation.
Procedure
1 Right-click any inventory object that is a valid parent object of a virtual machine, such as a data center,
folder, cluster, resource pool, or host, and select New Virtual Machine.
2 Select Create a new virtual machine and click Next.
3 Follow the steps required to create a virtual machine.
4 On the Customize Hardware page, click the Virtual Hardware tab.
5 Click the New Hard Disk triangle to expand the hard disk options.
6 (Optional) Adjust the default disk size.
With a thin virtual disk, the disk size value shows how much space is provisioned and guaranteed to
the disk. At the beginning, the virtual disk might not use the entire provisioned space and the actual
storage usage value could be less than the size of the virtual disk.
7 Select Thin Provision for Disk Provisioning.
8 Finish virtual machine creation.
You created a virtual machine with a disk in thin format.
What to do next
If you created a virtual disk in the thin format, you can later inate it to its full size.
View Virtual Machine Storage Resources
You can view how datastore storage space is allocated for your virtual machines.
Storage Usage shows how much datastore space is occupied by virtual machine les, including
conguration and log les, snapshots, virtual disks, and so on. When the virtual machine is running, the
used storage space also includes swap les.
For virtual machines with thin disks, the actual storage usage value might be less than the size of the virtual
disk.
Chapter 24 Storage Thick and Thin Provisioning
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