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d From the Disk Provisioning drop-down menu, select the format for the hard disk.
Option Action
Same format as source Use the same format as the source virtual machine.
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 thick provision lazy zeroed format, the data remaining on the physical
device is zeroed out during creation. It might take 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.
e From the Shares drop-down menu, select a value for the shares to allocate to the virtual disk.
Alternatively, you can select Custom and enter a value in the text box.
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.
f From the Limit - IOPs drop-down menu, customize 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.
g From the Disk Mode drop-down menu, select a disk mode.
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.
h From the Virtual Device Node, select a virtual device node or leave the default one.
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.
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