VSAN 6.2 Part 5 – New Sparse VM Swap Object

Those of you who have a good understanding of VSAN at this stage will know that a virtual machine deployed on the VSAN datastore is deployed as a set of objects, and not a set of files, which is how a VM is deployed on traditional datastores. Those objects include the VM Home Namespace, VMDKs and of course VM Swap. VM Swap is interesting, in that it only exists when the VM is powered on, but on VSAN it has always been provisioned with 100% Object Space Reservation in the past. This has some drawbacks, since it tended to consume…

Thin Provisioning Considerations when formatting volumes in a Guest OS

I had this question recently regarding the best way to format volumes in a Windows 2008 Guest OS, and if there were any considerations with the different formatting types on a volume which resides on a thin provisioned VMDK. Just to be certain that what I was stating was actually true, I set up a small test. Bottom line – use quick format when formatting the volume as a normal format will fill the volume, negating the space-saving associated with thin provisioned volumes.