6.7

The thin provisioned disk starts small and at first, uses just as much storage space as it needs for its
initial operations. After you convert the disk, it grows to its full capacity and occupies the entire datastore
space provisioned to it during the disk’s creation.
For more information about thin provisioning and available disk formats, see the vSphere Storage
documentation.
Procedure
1 Verify that the disk format of a virtual hard disk is Thin Provision.
a Right-click a virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
b On the Virtual Hardware tab, expand Hard disk and check the Type field.
c Click Cancel to exit the wizard.
2 Click the Datastores tab, and click a datastore from the list to open the datastore management panel.
The datastore that stores the virtual machine files is listed.
3 Click the Files tab, and open the virtual machine folder.
4 Browse to the virtual disk file that you want to convert.
The file has the .vmdk extension.
5 Convert the virtual disk to a thick provision format.
Client Steps
vSphere Client Click the virtual disk file and click the Inflate icon.
vSphere Web Client Right-click the virtual disk file and select Inflate.
The inflated virtual disk occupies the entire datastore space originally provisioned to it.
Add a Hard Disk to a Virtual Machine
When you create a virtual machine, a default virtual hard disk is added. You can add another hard disk if
you run out of disk space, if you want to add a boot disk, or for other file management purposes. When
you add a hard disk to a virtual machine, you can create a virtual disk, add an existing virtual disk, or add
a mapped SAN LUN.
You can add a virtual hard disk to a virtual machine before or after you add a SCSI or SATA storage
controller. The new disk is assigned to the first available virtual device node on the default controller, for
example (0:1). Only device nodes for the default controller are available unless you add additional
controllers.
vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
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