vSphere: Migrate from a Thick to a Thin VMDK
Inflating a Thin VMDK to a thick VMDK is easy, just browse your Datastore, select the VDMK file you want to inflate, right mouse click on it and select inflate.
Note: Your Virtual Machines needs to be powered off and inflating a disk can take-up some time. In my test I inflated a 5 GB Thin disk on witch 3,6 GB was occupied took 8 minutes.This was on a NetApp with Fiber Channel (1GB).
But what if we want to do the opposite? There are a few way to create a Thin VMDK file:
- Create a Virtual Machine
- Clone to a template
- Clone a Virtual Machine
- Use VMware Storage VMotion to migrate the virtual machine storage
So, the most easy way to migrate a Thick VMDK file to a Thin VMDK file is to use Storage VMotion.
- Right click the Virtual Machine and select Migrate
- Select change datastore
- Select the Lun you want to move the Virtual Machine to
- Select the format. This will be Thin provisioned format of course
- Select finish
That’s all
Michael Wilmsen is a experienced VMware Architect with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Main focus is VMware vSphere, Horizon View and Hyper Converged with a deep interest into performance and architecture.
Michael is VCDX 210 certified, has been rewarded with the vExpert title from 2011, Nutanix Tech Champion and a Nutanix Platform Professional.
Uncategorized | Michael August 31, 2009
By TBoy, October 13, 2010 @ 19:12
I agree this is an easy way to migrate from Thick to Thin provisioning. However, how do you addresss the same issue on virtual machines with snapshots?