6.0.1

7 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.
8 In the Shares drop-down menu, select a value for the shares to allocate to the virtual disk.
Shares is a value that represents the relative metric for controlling disk bandwidth. The values Low,
Normal, High, and Custom are compared to the sum of all shares of all virtual machines on the host.
9 If you selected Custom, type a number of shares in the text box.
10 In the Limit - IOPs box, enter the upper limit of storage resources to allocate to the virtual machine, or
select Unlimited.
This value is the upper limit of I/O operations per second allocated to the virtual disk.
11 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 that is using a
Buslogic controller with bus sharing turned on.
12 (Optional) Select a disk mode and click OK.
Option Description
Dependent
Dependent disks are included in snapshots.
Independent - Persistent
Disks in persistent mode behave like conventional disks on your physical
computer. All data written to a disk in persistent mode are written
permanently to the disk.
Independent - Nonpersistent
Changes to disks in nonpersistent mode are discarded when you power off
or reset the virtual machine. With nonpersistent mode, you can restart the
virtual machine with a virtual disk in the same state every time. Changes
to the disk are written to and read from a redo log file that is deleted when
you power off or reset.
Add an Existing Hard Disk to a Virtual Machine
You can add an existing virtual hard disk to a virtual machine when you customize the virtual machine
hardware during the virtual machine creation process or after the virtual machine is created. For example,
you might want to add an existing hard disk that is preconfigured as a boot disk.
During virtual machine creation, a hard disk and a SCSI or SATA controller are added to the virtual
machine by default, based on the guest operating system that you select. If this disk does not meet your
needs, you can remove it and add an existing hard disk at the end of the creation process.
vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
120 VMware, Inc.