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Content Owner: Roman Macek | ||||
Summary
Yes (incl. SE Sparse Disk)
Details
Thin provisioning allowing for disk space saving through allocation of space based on usage (not pre-allocation). vSphere 5 introduced some enhancements with additional VAAI functionality and VMFS5 (see Storage APIs) including reclaiming unused space.
However, traditional thin provisioning does not address reclaiming stale or deleted data within a guest OS, leading to a gradual growth of storage allocation to a guest OS over time.
With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware introduced a new virtual disk type, the space-efficient sparse virtual disk (SE sparse disk). One of its major features is the ability to reclaim previously used space within the guest OS. Another major feature of the SE sparse disk is the ability to set a granular virtual machine disk block allocation size according to the requirements of the application. Some applications running inside a virtual machine work best with larger block allocations; some work best with smaller blocks. This was not tunable in the past.
However, traditional thin provisioning does not address reclaiming stale or deleted data within a guest OS, leading to a gradual growth of storage allocation to a guest OS over time.
With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware introduced a new virtual disk type, the space-efficient sparse virtual disk (SE sparse disk). One of its major features is the ability to reclaim previously used space within the guest OS. Another major feature of the SE sparse disk is the ability to set a granular virtual machine disk block allocation size according to the requirements of the application. Some applications running inside a virtual machine work best with larger block allocations; some work best with smaller blocks. This was not tunable in the past.
