Thin Provisioning
VMware vSphere allows us to maximize utilization of our storage by using a deployment method called Thin Provisioning. Thin-provisioned storage is presented in full to the guest VM, but the host and storage are only utilizing the actual data capacity that is in use. In turn, this allows us to provision more capacity to VMs than what we physically have available. Thin Provisioning can be applied either on the array level, the virtual disk level, or a mixture of both. In this chapter, we will focus mostly on virtual disk or hypervisor thin provisioning; however, both are explained in the following sections.
Array thin provisioning
Most storage arrays support array level thin provisioning on a LUN-by-LUN basis. When a thin-provisioned LUN is presented to a host, any thin or lazy zeroed virtual disks on that LUN will consume only the storage that they need, freeing up the space they would normally consume to be provisioned to other LUNs on the array. All the dynamic growing processes...
