What does thin provisioning mean?
What is thin provisioning? Also known as virtual provisioning or thin storage, thin provisioning is the rival disk provisioning method. Thin provisioning allocates disk space to users on demand based on how much space they need at any given time.
What is thin and thick provisioning?
In thick provisioning, we allocate the complete space assigned to the virtual disk in the physical memory. If the virtual disk requires 100GB, then 100GB of the physical disk is pre-allocated to that disk. In thin provisioning, memory on the physical disk is allotted on the go as is required by the virtual disk.
What is thin provision in VM?
With thin provisioning you can create multiple VMs (virtual machines) on a physical hard drive without worrying whether you have the space to cover it because your hypervisor will apportion only the amount of space the VM is using.
What is the difference between thin-provisioned disk and thick provisioned disk?
Thin provisioning helps to avoid wasted physical capacity and can save businesses on up-front storage costs. However, thick provisioning has the benefit of less latency because all storage is allocated at once when virtual machines are created.
What is thin pool?
A thin pool is a storage source that provides on-demand allocation for storage space. It is more or less similar to virtual memory, which provides full address space to every process.
What is thin LUN?
A virtual LUN is often called a thin LUN. A logical unit number (LUN) is a unique identifier for allocated physical storage. A LUN can reference an entire RAID group, a single drive or partition, or multiple drives or partitions.
What is thin-provisioned space?
Thin provisioning (TP) is a method of optimizing the efficiency with which the available space is utilized in storage area networks (SAN). TP operates by allocating disk storage space in a flexible manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time.
What is thin provisioning in NetApp?
NetApp thin provisioning is designed to allow you to present more logical storage to hosts or users than you actually have in your physical storage pool. Instead of allocating space upfront, storage space is dynamically allocated to each volume or LUN as data is written.
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 provisioned space?
Does thin provisioning affect performance?
Thin-provisioned disks have no performance overhead due to fragmentation and perform similarly compared to a fully-allocated and zeroed thick disk (eager zeroed thick).
How do I know if my VMDK is thick or thin provisioned?
Thin vmdk files are supported on NFS datastores as of ESX 3.0. 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.