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. 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.
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Read more about Thick and Thin Provisioning: What Is the Difference? How to convert thick provisioning to thinĬonvert thick disk provisioning to thin on VMware ESXi with the options: A thin-provisioned virtual disk consumes only the space that it needs initially, and grows with time according to demand. Thin Provision: Thin provisioning is another type of storage pre-allocation.This sub-type of thick-provisioned virtual disk supports clustering features, such as fault tolerance.
Creating eager zeroed disks takes longer, because zeroes are written to the entire disk, but their performance is faster during the first writes. 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.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. 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. 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.Clone the VMDK to a thin provisioned disk using vmkfstools Convert thick provisioned to thin with vmkfstools in ESXi Shell (command line).How to convert thick provisioning to thin.