Storage
When I wrote about moving VM on ESXi without VMotion or Storage VMotion , I forgot about one neat VMware feature: thin provisioning. Quoting VMware: “(…) Thin Provisioning, a key component of vStorage, allows over-allocation of storage capacity for increased storage utilization, enhanced application uptime and simplified storage capacity management. (…)”. This means that a virtual machine configured with a 20GB virtual disk and only using 7GB of real data will see a 20GB disk but the file will only consume 7GB on the ESX storage. If the VM uses more storage, the file will grow until it reaches 20GB. Since then, you can save the storage for other VM.Continue reading...