1

I have a Windows 2012 server where I had drives thin provisioned originally. Found out recently that Disk Optimizer doesn't like thin provisioning, so I converted them to thick. Did this with a half dozen other VMs and was able to use Disk Optimizer on them.

This particular VM still reports the drives as thin even though they are now thick.

Anyone know what might be triggering this? If I clone the server, the clone reports the drives as thick. The underlying datastores are just local attached drives.

Environment is vSphere 6.7 w/ ESXi.

Thanks!

--Ben

Improve this question
5
  • 1
    What do you mean that "Disk Optimizer doesn't like thin provisioning"? It works perfectly well as far as I've ever heard. What it doesn't do is try to defragment a thin provisioned volume, because that just doesn't make any sense. It sends UNMAP commands instead.
    – Michael Hampton
    Jun 28, 2020 at 3:49
  • True; since these drives were slowing down (even thin provisioning can get mucked up over time) I did some testing by cloning the VM and then looking at the fragmentation level. Was pretty bad. That said, they are now thick after a migration but Windows doesn't detect that, even on a power restart.
    – Ben
    Jun 28, 2020 at 18:02
  • Just to be thorough, how do you know 100% that the storage is thick provisioned?
    – Michael Hampton
    Jun 28, 2020 at 18:10
  • In vSphere, you can query the status of a drive. Among other things it tells you how it was provisioned (thick, lazy zeroed; thick, eager zeroed; thin).
    – Ben
    Jun 29, 2020 at 19:26
  • OK, that's good enough! Have you rebooted the guest after changing it to thick provisioned?
    – Michael Hampton
    Jun 29, 2020 at 19:28

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .