Just a quick note today, more of a reference than anything else. I had the requirement recently to convert a load of VMs that had thin VMDKs to thick provisioned, however the client was not licensed for live Storage vMotion. In an effort to minimise downtime I decided the best thing to do was use the “Inflate” option in the datastore for that VMDK - this requires the VM to be powered off....
I have come across a number of environments where mystery “snapshot” files exist - they are not seen in snapshot manager, running a consolidation them doesn’t help, creating a snapshot (with memory, or guest OS quiescing) then running “Delete All” doesn’t resolve it, but some applications still think a snapshot is there. To take care of these is quite a manual process after you have followed all the VMware KB advice:...
VMWare, as of writing, has a nasty bug that means your backups that run utilising CBT (hint: if you have basically any enterprise backup product worth its salt, it’s got CBT enabled) it loses track of the changed blocks when the VMDK reaches any Power 2 value of 128GB (128, 256, 512, 1024, etc.) which may make your backup unrecoverable. The VMWare bug is in KB: kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2090639 ↗ The remedy for this is to disable and re-enable (reset) CBT on the affected machines, this can be done with the machine powered off or with it turned on by running PowerCLI commands and a snapshot, we will be doing the latter, no one likes downtime ↗:...
Introduction Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool vmkfstools, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk. Windows On Windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool SDelete ↗ (replace the [DRIVE:] with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1....
I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts. There are a few caveats here: The VMWare datastore for 2TB+ LUNs must be VMFS-5 as it is now GPT based, not MBR. This can be updated on the fly without shutting down VMs (Configuration -> Storage, Click the Datastore -> “Upgrade to VMFS-5”) Expanding the virtual disks on MD3000i’s can only be done in CLI....