Thin disks

Pointers for using thin-provisioned disks

Thin-provisioned disks, or thin disks, have been getting a lot of exposure as a new feature in vSphere, but they can already be used in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). If not properly managed, however, you can overcommit disk space to the point where you can run out of Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) space, which would cause your virtual machines (VMs) to crash or fail. (For information on what thin disks are and the other virtual disk types that are used in ESX, see Choosing a virtual disk type for VMware ESX: Raw, thick and thin disks.) There are a few things you should know about managing think disks to prevent this from happening.

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