To be able to reduce the VMDK file size of your thin-provisioned virtual disks, you need to know how to zero the blocks that the data you deleted previously occupied. NOTE : Disk shrinking operations are only possible if the virtual machines do not contain snapshots. Also, please be attentive and execute commands at your own responsibility. Always back up all of your important data before carrying out any disk operations. We can try to delete unnecessary files on this virtual disk. However, Linux does not automatically zero blocks after deleting files; you will have to do this yourself.
You can do this by using the dd data duplicator utility for copying and converting data. This tool is available on all Linux systems. NOTE : Before running the dd utility, it is necessary to make sure the datastore has enough capacity to use it e. In our case, 10, MB is the amount of free space that we want to fill with zeroes, so the number of 1-Megabyte blocks is This is where you should indicate the source from which you want to copy data.
After executing the above command, the size of our VMDK file grows. This is the output we see after the successfully completed command:.
This means that almost the whole root partition i. This is because we have filled most of the previously "available" space with zeroes. I would not like to cause any data loss. It doesn't matter if the disk was thin provisioned or thick provisioned, the process for expanding it is the same.
I forgot to mention that disk is in independent - persistent mode and sharing is set to multi-writer. You do it right from within the web-based GUI. Found this article. So should I ignore it and extend the disk with GUI and everything will be ok? The only important thing with extending eager zeroed disks via GUI or ESXCli is that the disk will turn to lazy zeroed after extension.
That does not impact your production in any way and may only slightly reduce the virtual machine's performance. If keeping the disk eager zeroed is essential, you can log in to your ESXi host via SSH, browse to the virtual machine's folder and run the following command:.
We've always extended virtual disks from the GUI, and we've never had any issues. In fairness, we prefer to use thin provisioning, so I defer to what Supaplex says about eager zeroed provisioning.
We've found that thin provisioning works well for our needs and that thick provisioning just wastes our disk space. I share my time between this website, my engineering job and an intense sporting activity. Vote Up Vote Down. Related Posts. VMware — failed to authentificate with the guest operating system using the supplied credentials.
April 20, April 20, March 18, March 18, VMware — Create a distributed port groups VMware 6. March 6, March 18, March 1, March 18, The below diagram shows the difference of these very clearly. If you create the same size VMDK using the three different types, it will look roughly like this on the datastore:. A Raw Device Mapping is when an entire volume from the storage array is given directly to a single VM and the VM has full control over its volume. You would want to leverage this for clustering, SAN-based snapshots, SAN-based replication or the ability to migrate a disk from a physical server to virtual or vice versa.
There are two types of RDM: physical and virtual. The physical shows the volume exactly as it appears from the storage array with no abstraction layer.
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