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Storage devices require zeroedthick policy by default (1017666)
Details
When a new virtual machine is deployed from a template on a VMFS-3 datastore, the eagerzeroedthick allocation policy is used. This results in a virtual disk that is fully allocated, and wasted storage on thin provisioned storage devices. The same problem exists when a virtual machine is migrated from one datastore to another using storage vMotion.
Solution
This behavior is modified with VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 release, so that the target allocation policy for the virtual disk is zeroedthick by default.
To set the default value on an ESX host:
In the vpxa.cfg file, add the following: <nfc> <eagerzeroedthick>false</eagerzeroedthick> </nfc>
Restart the VirtualCenter Agent on both source and destination ESX hosts.
Run vmkfstools -D <absolute path to clone>/<cloned disk name>-flat.vmdk.
Look for the output in the kernel log in /var/log to ensure that the tbz (to be zeroed) value is large.
Keywords
zeroedthick, eagerzeroedthick
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