running ESXi 5.5 here with a datastore on a single SSD. Now, I thought about changing to thin disks from thick and found that I could use a tool on the ESXi host to do that. However, the file size of the new created virtual disk is not changing. I run:

vmkfstools -i loader.vmdk -d 'thin' thinloader.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS thin-provisioned
Cloning disk 'loader.vmdk'...
Clone: 100% done.

After that I compared the virtual disksizes:

ls -la *.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     32212254720 Jun 10 08:25 loader-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           467 May 21 17:04 loader.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root     32212254720 Jun 10 08:27 thinloader-flat.vmdk
-rw-------    1 root     root           520 Jun 10 08:33 thinloader.vmdk

Stats on the original file:

stat loader.vmdk
  File: loader.vmdk
  Size: 467         Blocks: 0          IO Block: 131072 regular file
Device: 8bf64d175e27544ch/10085333178302026828d Inode: 419443780   Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2014-01-25 10:17:34.000000000
Modify: 2014-05-21 17:04:06.000000000
Change: 2014-05-21 17:04:06.000000000

and on the thin file:

stat thinloader.vmdk
  File: thinloader.vmdk
  Size: 520         Blocks: 0          IO Block: 131072 regular file
Device: 8bf64d175e27544ch/10085333178302026828d Inode: 432026692   Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2014-06-10 08:27:45.000000000
Modify: 2014-06-10 08:33:30.000000000
Change: 2014-06-10 08:33:30.000000000

Anyone an idea why the disk is not providing any more space (tried with multiple VM's already - all the same)? Also, I have noticed that the newly created file "autoappend" "-flat" to the disk ...

Thanks

Sven

• Update - diff of the vmdk config*

    --- loader.vmdk
    +++ thinloader.vmdk
    @@ -7,15 +7,17 @@
     createType="vmfs"

    -RW 62914560 VMFS "loader-flat.vmdk"
    +RW 62914560 VMFS "thinloader-flat.vmdk"

     ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
    +ddb.deletable = "true"
     ddb.geometry.cylinders = "3916"
     ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
     ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
     ddb.longContentID = "6d95855805dfa0079327dfee29b48dca"
    -ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 98 d5 7d 17 bf-ac 54 70 b1 2d 39 43 d5"
    +ddb.thinProvisioned = "1"
    +ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 93 c4 13 6c cf-bb 7b 34 c9 2c b4 dc 1e"
     ddb.virtualHWVersion = "8"