Comments on: VMware ESX 3.5 and thinprovisioning

By: Sven Huisman

Sven Huisman — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:11:22 +0000

My advise would be to don’t use the script. Thin provisioned disks are not supported in 3.5, especially if you are new to ESX.

Use the new vSphere (ESX 4.0) where thin provisioning is supported and integrated in the GUI.

By: Walt Kruer

Walt Kruer — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:37:54 +0000

I am very new to ESX and Vmware. We would like to thin provision all of our VMs so your script will be a great help. I am familiar with batch files but not the linux scripts. What type of file do I need to place the script in and how do I run it?

By: Thin Provisioning in ESX 3.5 « ben.neise.co.uk

Thin Provisioning in ESX 3.5 « ben.neise.co.uk — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:46:09 +0000

[...] my dream of being lauded for increasing our free space overnight came to an end. In an article on Virtual Future, Sven Huisman [...]

By: Sven Huisman

Sven Huisman — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:11:34 +0000

Great little script, thanks. I won’t use it though, because I use vSphere now

By: DHall

DHall — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:36:51 +0000

I have also created a small script that will loop through the vmdks and thin them automatically.

cd into the folder that the vmdks resides in. Make sure the VM is powered off. The script will create a temp folder and move the vmdks into this directory. It will then loop through each vmdk and clone them to thin back into the original directory. (Did it this way so you don’t have to modify the vmx)
Start your vm to make sure everything is kosher, then rm –rf /temp

mkdir temp; for f in `ls | egrep ‘*\.vmdk$’` ; do mv $f temp/; done; cd temp; for vmdk in `ls | egrep ‘*\.vmdk$’ | grep -v flat` ; do vmkfstools -i $vmdk ../$vmdk -d thin ; done ;

By: S.O.

S.O. — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:41:41 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for this great and complete post.You mentioned that Storage VMotion creates thick VM as a result. The same situation happens when cloning the VM or deploying a new VM from template as you said – the thin provisioned source will give you the thick disks, which you may want to manually convert to thin ones, again. Cumbersome, although I like using CLI.

Maybe the new functionality added in VMware vSphere 4 will solve this problem.

Regards,
S.

By: Virtualization Short Take #24 - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:53:55 +0000

[...] H. over at VirtualFuture.info posted a good guide on using thin provisioned VMDKs with VMware ESX 3.5 via the vmkfstools command. (I was going to include a trackback to Sven’s [...]

By: Virtually Challenged » Using a thin disk on VMware ESX 3.5

Virtually Challenged » Using a thin disk on VMware ESX 3.5 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:06:16 +0000

[...] http://virtualfuture.info/2008/12/vmware-esx-35-and-thinprovisioning/ [...]