I don't want to set side storage that I wind up never using, and I've noticed that SSDs are fast enough that the impact of not pre-allocating/thick provisioning isn't noticeable. For now, let's just say I'm done with thick provisioning in my home lab, even on spinning drives, with my whole storage strategy laid out here. My alternative means I do have to monitor datastore usage careful. This tends to waste space, and increases the hassle, having to grow that Windows VM's C: drive. Using thin provisioning for everything, I don't have to try to figure out in advance how much storage the VM will ever need. The physical SSD is actually much much smaller, merely 256GB in this case, actually. That way, the VM "thinks" it has, say, a 750GB drive (could go all the way up to 62TB with EFI virtual BIOS type). That's right, your VMFS filesystem that has a bunch of thin provisioned VMs will invariably run into trouble, especially obvious with smaller SSDs.Īll my VMs that I leave running on SSD storage are thinly provisioned, even VCSA. The dirty secret here is that here is no automatic space reclamation in this scenario. And this was precious SSD storage, where I leave all my most used VMs are left running.
But guess what? The VMFS datastore space in use indication didn't drop at all. I next looked at the C: drive in the Windows 10 VM after the upgrade, and it showed 42GB of data.Īfter running the "Disk Clean-up for C:" wizard, I now had 21GB of data, halving my storage need. This level of commitment also removed my instant way to revert to Windows 7. After I was comfortable that all was well with the VM, and finished up some minor tweaks to Hamachi's gateway function to get it going again, I then deleted all the snapshots. I then mounted the Windows 10 windows.iso file, and ran through the usual upgrade process. So I grabbed a snapshot of the VM before I began, as a very quick backup of sorts. Of course, I also wanted to be able to roll-back very easily, if things went sideways. I was curious how an upgrade would go, straight to Windows 10. This was my last of my home lab's VMs stuck back in Windows 7. I have a VM that I occasionally use for Hamachi VPN Gateway duties, at least until I get my OpenVPN appliance wired straight to my cablemodem again.
Eventually you get weary of the warnings, and you certainly don't want to get to 100% full, when VMs get frozen. Kind of gets your attention when your datastores start to fill, or you can't Storage vMotion VMs in.
This is one of those home lab housekeeping duties that I just hadn't gotten around to. Posted by Paul Braren on (updated on Jul 6 2016) in
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