VMware disk types

 Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed: is a disk that takes all of its space at the time of its
creation, but this space may contain some old data on the physical media. This old
data is not erased or written over, so it needs to be “zeroed out” before new data can
be written to the blocks. This type of disk can be created more quickly, but its
performance will be lower for the first writes due to the increased IOPS (input/output
operations per second) for new blocks.

 Thick Provision Eager Zeroed: is a disk that gets all of the required space still at
the time of its creation, and the space is wiped clean of any previous data on the
physical media. Creating eager zeroed disks takes longer, because zeroes are written
to the entire disk, but their performance is faster during the first writes. This sub-type
of thick-provisioned virtual disk supports clustering features, such as fault tolerance.

 Thin Provision: Thin provisioning is another type of storage pre-allocation. A thin-

provisioned virtual disk consumes only the space that it needs initially, and grows with
time according to demand.

What is thin and thick provision in VMware?

Thin provisioning helps to avoid wasted physical capacity and can save businesses on up-
front storage costs. However, thick provisioning has the benefit of less latency because all
storage is allocated at once when virtual machines are created.

This means that creating a 100GB virtual disk actually consumes 100GB of physical disk
space, which also means that the physical storage is unavailable for anything else, even if
no data has been written to the disk.

Thick provisioning contrasts with thin provisioning, which provisions storage on an as-

needed basis. Thin provisioning helps to avoid wasted physical capacity and can save
businesses on up-front storage costs. However, thick provisioning has the benefit of
less latency because all storage is allocated at once when virtual machines are created.
Thick and Thin Provisioning: What Is the Difference?
In this article, we are going to consider the storage pre-allocation aspect of virtual disk
settings in detail and find out what thick and thin provisioning are, how they differ, and
which of these storage pre-allocation types is better for your infrastructure.

Thick Provisioning

Thick provisioning is a type of storage pre-allocation. With thick provisioning, the complete
amount of virtual disk storage capacity is pre-allocated on the physical storage when the
virtual disk is created. A thick-provisioned virtual disk consumes all the space allocated to it
in the datastore right from the start, so the space is unavailable for use by other virtual
machines.

There are two sub-types of thick-provisioned virtual disks:

 A Lazy zeroed disk is a disk that takes all of its space at the time of its creation, but
this space may contain some old data on the physical media. This old data is not
erased or written over, so it needs to be "zeroed out" before new data can be written
to the blocks. This type of disk can be created more quickly, but its performance will
be lower for the first writes due to the increased IOPS (input/output operations per
second) for new blocks;
 An Eager zeroed disk is a disk that gets all of the required space still at the time of
its creation, and the space is wiped clean of any previous data on the physical media.
Creating eager zeroed disks takes longer, because zeroes are written to the entire
disk, but their performance is faster during the first writes. This sub-type of thick-
provisioned virtual disk supports clustering features, such as fault tolerance.

For data security reasons, eager zeroing is more common than lazy zeroing with thick-
provisioned virtual disks. Why? When you delete a VMDK, the data on the datastore is not
totally erased; the blocks are simply marked as available, until the operating system
overwrites them. If you create an eager zeroed virtual disk on this datastore, the disk area
will be totally erased (i.e., zeroed), thus preventing anyone with bad intentions from being
able to recover the previous data – even if they use specialized third-party software.

Thin Provisioning

Thin provisioning is another type of storage pre-allocation. A thin-provisioned virtual disk

consumes only the space that it needs initially, and grows with time according to demand.
For example, if you create a new thin-provisioned 30GB virtual disk and copy 10 GB of files
to it, the size of the resulting VMDK file will be 10 GB, whereas you would have a 30GB
VMDK file if you had chosen to use a thick-provisioned disk.

Thin-provisioned virtual disks are quick to create and useful for saving storage space. The
performance of a thin-provisioned disk is not higher than that of a lazy zeroed thick-
provisioned disk, because for both of these disk types, zeroes have to be written before
writing data to a new block. Note that when you delete your data from a thin-provisioned
virtual disk, the disk size is not reduced automatically. This is because the operating system
deletes only the indexes from the file table that refer to the file body in the file system; it
marks the blocks that belonged to "deleted" files as free and accessible for new data to be
written onto. This is why we see file removal as instant. If it were a full deletion, where
zeroes were written over the blocks that the deleted files occupied, it would take about the
same amount of time as copying the files in question. See the simplified illustration below.
Issues That May Occur When Using Thin-Provisioned Virtual Disks

Using thin-provisioned virtual disks is not always smooth. There are some issues that you
should be aware of and prepared to deal with.

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Let’s consider an example that renders the virtual machines unusable. For example, we have
a 20GB datastore with three virtual machines running on it. Each virtual machine has a thin-
provisioned virtual disk set with a maximum size of 10 GB. (This practice is called
"overprovisioning" – we assign virtual disks more space than they can physically take up.
This is done often, as it allows you to scale the system by adding more physical storage as
you need it.) The file size of each virtual disk will expand as data is added, until there is no
free space left on the datastore. The situation becomes critical when there is only 1GB of
free space left on the datastore, as when, for example, VM1 occupies 8 GB, VM2 occupies 7
GB, and VM3 - 4 GB.

Regular methods of file deletion within virtual machines will not help shrink the thin-
provisioned virtual disks. If more than 1 GB of new data is written to any of these virtual
machines, all three of them will fail, and you will need to migrate one or more of the virtual
machines to another datastore to restore their running states.

How to Reduce the Size of Thin-Provisioned Virtual Disk After Deleting Files

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. Let’s find out
how to do that.

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. To back
up your VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, use NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
Shrinking Thin-Provisioned VMware Disks in Linux

Let’s consider an example: we have a 10,266,496 KB (10GB) VMDK file (we learned about
its size by going to the directory on the datastore where our virtual machine is located) and
want to shrink the virtual disk on which the guest Linux OS is installed. 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.g., for ESXi server, you can check the storage capacity in the storage
section of the vSphere client – go to Configuration >> Storage).
Let’s use the dd utility.
1. First, we check the free space on a guest Linux virtual machine by using the df -
h command: 

root@test-virtual-machine:/# df -h

We get the following output in the console:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on udev 469M 0 469M 0% /dev tmpfs
99M 6,3M 92M 7% /run /dev/sda7 17G 8,8G 6,4G 58% / tmpfs 491M 116K 491M
1% /dev/shm tmpfs 5,0M 4,0K 5,0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 491M 0 491M 0%
/sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 945M 121M 760M 14% /boot /dev/sda6 3,7G 13M 3,5G
1% /var/log tmpfs 99M 36K 99M 1% /run/user/1000

We can see from this output that the / (root) partition contains 8.8 GB of files.
2. Let’s delete a few gigabytes of unnecessary files in the root partition. This is what
we see in the console, if we run the df -h / command: 

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda7 17G 4,7G 11G 31% /

Thus, our root partition now contains 4.7 GB of files. However, going to the
directory where our VMDK file is located, we can see that its size is still
10,266,496 KB (10 GB).

3. Now we are going to fill the free space with zeroes (in our case, we’ll fill 10 GB out
of 11 GB available). First, we type cd followed by the name of the directory that
the partition that needs to be zeroed out is mounted to (in our case it is cd /,
because we want to navigate to the root partition). After that, we run the
following command, changing the variables to suit our needs: 

dd bs=1M count=10240 if=/dev/zero of=zero

In this command:

- dd can only be run as super user.

- bs sets the block size (for example, bs=1M would give you a 1-Megabyte block
size).
- count specifies the number of blocks to be copied (the default is for dd to keep
going forever or until the input runs out). In our case, 10,240 MB is the amount of
free space that we want to fill with zeroes, so the number of 1-Megabyte blocks is
10240.
 - if stands for "input file". This is where you should indicate the source from which
you want to copy data. In our case, it is /dev/zero – a special file (a pseudo-
device) that provides as many null characters as you want to read from it.
- of stands for "output file". This is where you set the destination where you want
to write/paste your data (in our case, the name of the file is zero).
After executing the above command, the size of our VMDK file grows. This is the
output we see after the successfully completed command:

10240+0 records in 10240+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (10 GB) copied,
59,4348 s, 181 MB/s Command has been completed successfully.

So, now the size of our VMDK file is 11,321,856 KB (10.8 GB), meaning that it has
expanded. Also, if we run the df -h / command again, we will see the following:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda7 17G 15G 569M 97% /

This means that almost the whole root partition (i.e., 97%) is occupied. This is
because we have filled most of the previously "available" space with zeroes. Now,
our thin-provisioned virtual disk is ready to be shrunk.

NOTE: To perform shrinking, it is necessary to install VMware Tools.

4. For virtual machines that are running on VMware ESXi or VMware Workstation, we
execute the following two commands in the Linux guest OS.a) To make sure that
the disk partition is available, we run the command: 

root@test-virtual-machine:/# vmware-toolbox-cmd disk list

This is the output we see in our case (i.e., we see the list of available partitions):

/ /boot /var/log

The root partition is present, so we can proceed.

b) To shrink the partition, we run the following command:

root@test-virtual-machine:/# vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /

This is the output we see in our case:

Please disregard any warnings about disk space for the duration of shrink process.
Progress: 100 [===========>] Disk shrinking complete.

Now, the size of our shrinked VMDK file is 5,323,456 KB (that is, 5.08 GB – much
less than the 10.8 GB it was before).
NOTE: If your guest virtual machine is running on an ESXi server, after filling the blocks
with zeroes, you can follow these steps:
1. Power off the virtual machine, or disconnect the virtual disk you want to shrink.
2. Connect to the ESXi host with the SSH client.
3. Navigate to the Virtual Machine Folder.
4. Verify disk usage with du -h.
5. Run vmkfstools -K test-virtual-machine.vmdk.
6. Verify disk usage with du -h once again.
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Shrinking Thin-Provisioned VMware Disks in Windows

Like Linux, Windows does not automatically zero blocks after deleting files. To be able to
zero the free space of the target disks on your Windows virtual machine, you need to
download SDelete – a free utility from the Microsoft’s Sysinternals Suite – and unzip the files
from the downloaded archive to c:\program files\sdelete.
Then follow these steps:
1. Run cmd.
2. Go to the directory where SDelete is located. In our case, it is: cd c:\program files\
sdelete
3. For each partition in the console, use the sdelete -z command. This is what we
have in our case: 

sdelete -z c: sdelete -z d:

These commands will zero out any free space on your thin-provisioned disk by
filling in any unused space on the specified partitions.

Wait a couple of minutes until the process is finished. Your VMDK file will expand
to its maximum size during the process.

4. Make sure VMware Tools are installed on your Windows virtual machine. By
default, VMware Tools are installed to c:\program files\vmware\vmware tools\.
Navigate to this directory by typing: cd c:\program files\vmware\vmware tools\.
5. To view the available disk partitions, type:vmwaretoolboxcmd disk list
6. Shrink the disk partitions that you need. In our case, we ran the commands: 

vmwaretoolboxcmd disk shrink c:\ vmwaretoolboxcmd disk shrink d:\

Wait until the program has finished shrinking the disk.

You can use this method for virtual machines that are running on VMware ESXi or VMware
Workstation.

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VMware Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler

Above, we mentioned a solution to shrink thin-provisioned disks manually. However, there is
one more way to manage your virtual disks (both thin-provisioned and thick-provisioned), if
you use a datastore cluster in vSphere. VMware provides automatic virtual disk migration
within the datastore cluster to avoid overflow of disk storage where thin-provisioned virtual
disks are located and to balance I/O resources. If you have more than one shared datastore
mounted to the ESXi server, you can set up the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler
(Storage DRS). Storage DRS is an intelligent vCenter Server feature for efficiently managing
VMFS and NFS storage that provides automatic virtual machine disk placement and
migration. You can also set Storage DRS to manual mode if you prefer to approve migration
recommendations manually.

Follow these steps to enable Storage DRS:

1. Navigate to the datastore cluster in the vSphere Web Client.
2. Go to vCenter >> Datastore Clusters.
3. Select your datastore cluster and click Manage >> Settings >> Services >>
Storage DRS.
4. Click Edit.
 5. Configure the automation settings, I/O-related functions, and advanced options
that you need.

6. Click OK to finish.
If there are no datastore clusters in your vSphere environment, follow these steps to create
and set up a new datastore cluster:

1. Navigate to vCenter >> Datacenters in the vSphere Web Client.

2. Right-click on your Datacenter and select New Datastore Cluster.
3. Enter the name of your datastore cluster and tick the checkbox near "Turn On
Storage DRS".
 4. Select the automation settings, I/O-related functions, and advanced options that
you need.
5. Click OK to finish.
Conclusion

In this blog post, we have considered the types of virtual disks and weighed the advantages
and disadvantages of each in order to better understand the differences between thick and
thin provisioning. Eager zeroed thick-provisioned disks are the best for performance and
security, but require enough free storage space and take a lot of time to be created. Lazy
zeroed thick-provision disks are good for their short creation times, but they do not provide
as much speed as eager zeroed disks do, and are less secure. Thin-provisioned disks are the
best choice to save datastore space at the moment of disk creation.

You can create a virtual disk with a greater maximum size than the physical space you have
available (“overprovisioning”) and add more physical storage in the future, but remember
that if the physical disk space fills up and the thin-provisioned disk cannot grow to
accommodate more data, your virtual machines will become unusable – so don’t forget to
keep an eye on the amount of free space. We also went through methods of shrinking thin-
provisioned VMware virtual disks, in case you prefer not to add more storage and need to
reduce the space taken.

How to convert thick provisioning to thin

Convert thick disk provisioning to thin on VMware ESXi with the options:

1. VMware converter
2. VMware vCenter (vMotion)
3. VMware command line (this article)
If you do have vCenter configured, it’s best to move a VM with VMotion and select the virtual
disk format Thin Provision in the wizard. You can use VMware converter or command line if
you don’t have vCenter, you only have one ESXi host, or don’t want to spend a license to get
more features.

Convert thick provisioned to thin with vmkfstools in ESXi Shell (command line)

In this step by step guide, you will learn how to convert a thick provisioned lazy zeroed disk
to thin on VMware ESXi 6.7. The steps are the same for other ESXi versions. You will use the
vmkfstools command.

The vmkfstools command offers the ability to clone virtual machine content and also convert
from one virtual machine disk (.vmdk) format into another.

Read the VMware documentation about cloning and converting virtual machine disks with
vmkfstools.

Step 1. Check VMware hard disk type

Log in to VMware ESXi. Click in the left menu on Virtual Machines. In the Virtual Machine
list view, right-click on the VM and click Edit Settings.
Good to check is the VM used space. The used space column shows the VM as 60 GB used
space.
Expand the Hard disk and check the Type. The hard disk type is thick provisioned, lazily
zeroed.

Step 2. Shut down VM

Shut down the VM that you want to convert if you did not do that already.

Virtual machine disk files are locked while in-use by a running virtual machine.
Step 3. Enable SSH on VMware ESXi host
Enable SSH via the GUI. Expand Host and click on Manage. Click the tab Services and find
the service name TSM-SSH. Click on Start.

An information banner will show up that the service TSM-SSH successfully started.

Step 4. SSH into the ESXi host

SSH into the host with the application Putty.

Log in with the user privileges account.

login as: root

Keyboard-interactive authentication prompts from server:
| Password:
End of keyboard-interactive prompts from server
The time and date of this login have been sent to the system logs.

WARNING:
All commands run on the ESXi shell are logged and may be included in
support bundles. Do not provide passwords directly on the command line.
Most tools can prompt for secrets or accept them from standard input.

VMware offers supported, powerful system administration tools. Please

see www.vmware.com/go/sysadmintools for details.

The ESXi Shell can be disabled by an administrative user. See the

vSphere Security documentation for more information.

Step 5. Navigate to the VM folder

Navigate to the VM folder under /vmfs/volumes/ with the command cd vmfs/volumes.
[root@localhost:~] cd vmfs/volumes
Copy

List the name of the VM store with ls -lh

total 1792
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Jan 1 1970 5c0b0ded-b7a4a6f0-3ff8-6d6c6426e4f1
drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 76.0K Jan 5 20:06 5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Jan 1 1970 5e88eeda-f0c3ecce-d429-1c697a0f86bd
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8 Jan 1 1970 62577ee5-b5de7369-1044-083e27a116b0
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 35 Jan 5 20:42 datastore01 -> 5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-
1c697a0f86bd
Copy

Change to the directory of the datastore. In this example, cd datastore01.

[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes] cd datastore01
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd]
Copy

List the VM names in the datastore with ls -lh.

[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd] ls -lh
total 1024
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72.0K Jan 5 19:08 DC01-2016
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76.0K Jan 5 19:14 EX01-2016
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76.0K Jan 5 19:08 EX02-2016
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76.0K Jan 5 20:02 FS01-2016
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72.0K Jan 5 20:06 ISO
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72.0K Jan 5 19:08 KLB01
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 72.0K Jan 5 19:17 PC01
Copy

Change to the directory of the VM. In this example, it’s the file server FS01-2016. Run the
command cd FS01-2016.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd] cd FS01-2016
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016]
Copy

Run the command ls -lh to list the files in the directory.

[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016] ls -lh
total 62916608
-rw------- 1 root root 60.0G Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 264.5K Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016.nvram
-rw------- 1 root root 450 Jan 5 21:58 FS01-2016.vmdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 5 21:58 FS01-2016.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.2K Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016.vmx
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 226.5K Jan 5 22:04 vmware.log
Copy

Step 6. Clone the VMDK to a thin provisioned disk using vmkfstools

Use the command vmkfstools -i FS01-2016.vmdk -d thin FS01-2016-thin.vmdk.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016]
vmkfstools -i FS01-2016.vmdk -d thin FS01-2016-thin.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk 'FS01-2016.vmdk'...
Clone: 100% done.
Copy

List the files in the directory and verify that two files are created: FS01-2016.thin-
flat.vmdk and FS01-2016.thin.vmdk.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016] ls -lh
total 72898560
-rw------- 1 root root 60.0G Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 60.0G Jan 5 22:07 FS01-2016-thin-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 504 Jan 5 22:07 FS01-2016-thin.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 264.5K Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016.nvram
-rw------- 1 root root 450 Jan 5 21:58 FS01-2016.vmdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 5 21:58 FS01-2016.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.2K Jan 5 22:04 FS01-2016.vmx
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 226.5K Jan 5 22:04 vmware.log
Copy

Step 7. Rename old flat file

Rename the old file with the command mv FS01-2016-flat.vmdk FS01-2016-
flat.vmdk.old.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016] mv
FS01-2016-flat.vmdk FS01-2016-flat.vmdk.old
Copy

Step 8. Rename new flat file

Rename the thin flat file with the command mv FS01-2016-thin-flat.vmdk FS01-2016-
flat.vmdk.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016] mv
FS01-2016-thin-flat.vmdk FS01-2016-flat.vmdk
Copy

Step 9. Unregister VM from ESXi

This is necessary for the host to recognize the new disk type. Right-click VM >
Unregister.

Click Yes.
Step 10. Register VM in ESXi
Click on Create / Register VM.

Select Register an existing virtual machine. Click on Next.

Click on Select one or more virtual machines, a datastore, or a directory.

Open the VM FS01-2016 and select the FS01-2016.vmx file. Click Select.

Click on Next.
Click Finish.

Step 11. Verify hard disk type conversion

Check the VM hard disk size. In this example, the hard disk changed from 60 GB to 9.56
GB.
Right-click on the VM and select Edit Settings.

Expand hard disk and check the Type. It shows as Thin provisioned.

Step 12. Start the VM

Start the VM and check that everything works as expected.

Step 13. Delete unnecessary VMDK files

Clean up and remove the files. Run the command rm FS01-2016-thin.vmdk && rm
FS01-2016-flat.vmdk.old.
[root@localhost:/vmfs/volumes/5e88aaf7-7ab335e2-4adc-1c697a0f86bd/FS01-2016] rm
FS01-2016-thin.vmdk && rm FS01-2016-flat.vmdk.old
Copy

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to convert thick provisioned disk to thin on VMware ESXi.
Check the disk type before you start to convert from thick to thin disk in the command line
interface. Verify the conversion at the end and start up the system to make sure all is
working.