From the perspective of ESXi, nothing really happened to that VMDK – data is still stored in those same locations despite files being deleted in the guest OS. the data stored there is no longer needed and can be replaced with new data in the future.
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In the example of my Windows jump box, the deletion of OVA and ISO files simply instructed the underlying NTFS filesystem to make those blocks available to be overwritten. There are a few reasons for this, but the important thing to remember is that when space is freed in the guest operating system, it doesn’t mean that those blocks no longer contain data. They don’t shrink on their own to release freed disk space. Unfortunately, as you can see, thin VMDKs only expand. Thin provisioned disks are designed to expand and consume more disk space as the virtual machine requires. Using the ‘du’ command – for disk usage – we can see the flat file containing the data is still consuming over 43GB of space: du -h *flat*.vmdkĪlthough this certainly isn’t a new topic, and has been covered elsewhere, I wanted to document my own experience with this process and provide some extra context in case it may be helpful. rw- 1 root root 8.5K Feb 16 15:26 jump.nvram rw- 1 root root 50.0G Feb 16 17:55 jump-flat.vmdk rw- 1 root root 3.1M Feb 12 21:50 jump-ctk.vmdk In this case, the disk has been expanded to 50GB: ls -lhaĭrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.0K Feb 12 21:50. Notice below that doing a normal directory listing displays the maximum possible size of a thin disk. Despite freeing up lots of space, the VM’s VMDK was still consuming a lot more than 26GB.
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After this, I had about 26GB used and 23GB free – much better.īecause 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.
I expanded the disk by 10GB to take it from 40GB to 50GB, and moved off all the large files. 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. I recently ran into a situation in my home lab where my Windows jump box ran out of disk space. 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.
Using thin provisioned virtual disks can provide many benefits.