What is thin provisioning and thick provisioning in storage?

In virtual storage, thick provisioning is a type of storage allocation in which the amount of storage capacity on a disk is pre-allocated on physical storage at the time the disk is created. Thin provisioning helps to avoid wasted physical capacity and can save businesses on up-front storage costs.

Does thin provisioning reduce data size?

By now it should be obvious that Thin Provisioning delivers capacity efficiency, not data reduction. While the volume size can vary, the data size remains the same. Including Thin Provisioning in data reduction savings can arbitrarily increase the data reduction ratio.

What does provisioning storage mean?

Storage provisioning is the process of assigning storage, usually in the form of server disk drive space to optimize the performance of a storage area network (SAN).

What are the benefits of thin provisioning?

Benefits of using thin provisioning

• Allows storage to be provisioned but not consumed until data is written.
• Storage-provisioning time is greatly reduced, because you can create the storage for an application quickly, without depending on the actual physical space available.

What is difference between thin and thick provisioning?

To be able to reduce the VMDK file size of your thin-provisioned virtual disks, you need to know how to zero the blocks that the data you deleted previously occupied. Let’s find out how to do that. NOTE: Disk shrinking operations are only possible if the virtual machines do not contain snapshots.

Is thin provisioned drive SSD?

Thin provisioning means space is only consumed on these expensive drives when data is written, leaving as much space free as possible and the drives operating at peak performance. While thin provisioning is gaining popularity, few vendors offer the technology for SSDs.

What is thin provisioning VM?

Thin provisioning is another type of storage pre-allocation. A thin-provisioned virtual disk consumes only the space that it needs initially, and grows with time according to demand.

How do I know if my VM is thin provisioned?

From the service console you can compare the output of the ‘ls’ command with the output of the ‘du’ command to tell if the vmdk is thin provisioned.

Does thin provisioning affect performance?

A thin-provisioned disk exhibits the same performance as a lazy-zeroed thick-provisioned disk. A thick-provisioned eager-zeroing disk will write data faster than a thin-provisioned disk. Because of overprovisioning, thin provisioning will cause problems when users approach their maximum storage capacity.

How do I know if my VM is thin-provisioned?

How do I know if my vmdk is thick or thin provisioned?