I created a thin provisioned vm (version 10), independent disks, persistent, with a disk size of 100GB. I installed SLES11 SP3 x86_64 in this vm. OS, patches, and software takes up approx 6GB of space. Why is the -flat.vmdk file 105GB? My thick provisioned vm's with same O/S and 150GB of disk space results in a 155GB -flat.vmdk file. This makes sense. But I expected thin provisioning to be much smaller. Is version 10 thin provisioning broke, or is this the result of independent disks, persistent (which are the requirements to be able to later shrink this vm)? Anybody have any experience with this? Thank you
Ok, I now see that my vm is taking up 15.8 GB of actual space. I have changed the problem description from "Why is thin provisioned vm no smaller than thick?" to "Why is thin provisioned vm so large?" since my actual O/S is only using 10GB of space (12GB if you count 2GB of empty /swap) but my vmdk file is 50% larger than that. Is this to be expected? I ran vmkfstools --punchzero on this vm so it should be as small as possible. Are there other tools to shrink the vmdk file to something closer to the actual used space?