6.5.1

You can use Storage vMotion or cross-host Storage vMotion to transform virtual disks from one format to
another.
Thick Provision Lazy
Zeroed
Creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual
disk is allocated when the disk is created. Data remaining on the physical
device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand later on
first write from the virtual machine. Virtual machines do not read stale data
from the physical device.
Thick Provision Eager
Zeroed
A type of thick virtual 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 when the virtual disk is created. It might
take longer to create virtual disks in this format than to create other types of
disks.
Thin Provision Use this format to save storage space. For the thin disk, you provision as
much datastore space as the disk would require based on the value that
you enter for the virtual disk size. However, the thin disk starts small and at
first, uses only as much datastore space as the disk needs for its initial
operations. If the thin disk needs more space later, it can grow to its
maximum capacity and occupy the entire datastore space provisioned to it.
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 first accessed.
Note If a virtual disk supports clustering solutions such as Fault Tolerance,
do not make the disk thin.
Create Thin Provisioned Virtual Disks
To save storage space, you can create a virtual disk in a thin provisioned format. The thin provisioned
virtual disk starts small and expands 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.
vSphere Storage
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