How can I copy a Virtual Machine on VMWare ESXi 4 while maintaining Thin Provisioning?

Posted by Billy ONeal on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Billy ONeal
Published on 2010-05-22T14:43:05Z Indexed on 2010/05/22 14:51 UTC
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We have an ESXi host we use for testing, which results in a ton of VMs being created and copied on a regular basis. We don't have the storage capacity to use thick provisioned VMs on this server, and have been maintaining the copies using VMWare Converter. But using the converter is an incredibly slow operation which copies the entire contents of the VM over the network several times before actually finishing the copy.

Is there a way to simply clone the VM but maintain the thin-provisioning?

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