Using thin provisioned virtual disks can provide many benefits. Not only do they allow over-provisioning, but with the prevalence of flash storage, performance degradation really isn’t a concern like it used to be. I recently ran into a situation in my home lab where my Windows jump box ran out of disk space. I had downloaded a bunch of OVA and ISO files and had forgotten to move them over to a shared drive that I use for archiving.

Vmkfstools is an ESXi Shell command line interface (CLI) for building and managing volumes and virtual disks on an ESX/ESXi host. Among its storage administration features, vmkfstools can be used to copy, convert, rename, import, export and resize virtual disks.

I expanded the disk by 10GB to take it from 40GB to 50GB, and moved off all the large files. After this, I had about 26GB used and 23GB free – much better. Because that jump box is sitting on flash storage – which is limited in my lab – I had thin provisioned this VM to conserve as much disk space as possible. Despite freeing up lots of space, the VM’s VMDK was still consuming a lot more than 26GB. Notice below that doing a normal directory listing displays the maximum possible size of a thin disk.

In this case, the disk has been expanded to 50GB: [root@esx0:/vmfs/volumes/58f77a6f-30961726-ac7e-002655e1b06c/jump] ls -lha total 49741856 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.0K Feb 12 21:50. Drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 4.1K Feb 16 16:13. Welcome to vswitchzero, a blog with a focus on VMware NSX, vSphere, routing/switching and PC hardware. The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer. Search for: Search Recent Posts • March 6, 2019 • February 27, 2019 • February 26, 2019 • February 21, 2019 • February 20, 2019 • February 19, 2019 • February 4, 2019 • January 31, 2019 • January 28, 2019 • January 10, 2019 • December 19, 2018 • December 18, 2018 All Categories • (1) • (6) • (18) • (72) • (6) • (1) • (4) • (4) • (17) • (3) • (3) • (36) • (2) • (14) • (14) • (12) • (9) • (7) • (19) • (13) • (8) • (4) • (7) • (1) • (1) RSS. Chiang elements of dynamic optimization pdf files software.