Replication Job changes Thin disk to Thick disks

[eric]

Hello,

Are they any plans to support Thin to Thin replication? Right now Thin disks are converted to Thick.

~Eric

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Eric,

Yes, you're correct, right now thin disks are replicated as thick, and we do have plans to support thin disk replication in our next release.

Thank you!

[withanh]

Vitaliy, will you be implementing this with VM Copy job as well? We will probably be doing VM Copy for our weekly offsite and when I did a couple of proof of concept jobs this weekend I noticed they are forced thick, not thin like the source.

Thanks!

h

[Gostev]

Darhl, thin provisioning is VMFS-specific feature, and such disks simply cannot be stored in thin form to "regular" file systems like NTFS or ext3, which are unaware about thin provisioning.

One thing that comes to my mind is converting thin-provisioned disks to sparse disks on the fly... but this would cause issues at restore (how do you turn sparse disk back into thin-provisioned)?

[withanh]

Ah, I did not understand that thin-provisioning is VMFS specific. That's good to know. It won't really affect anything, other than making sure I have enough disk space to store the vm-copy jobs.

Thanks!