【What’s the Difference?】Thin Provisioning vs. Thick Provisioning in VMware

When creating a VMware virtual machine, you can choose between two available storage pre-allocation options: thin provisioning and thick provisioning. While both allocate storage space for the virtual disk, they are fundamentally different.

"Thin Provisioning" 是一种分配存储资源的方法，中文可以翻译为 "瘦预分配" 或 "精简配置"。在传统的存储系统中，创建存储卷或分区时，会一次性分配全部物理空间。但使用精简配置，你会为虚拟存储分配逻辑容量，而实际的物理存储则根据需要动态分配，即在写入数据时才分配。 这种方法的优势在于更有效地利用存储空间，因为只有在实际写入数据时才会消耗物理存储。它还简化了存储系统的管理和扩展，因为你不需要提前预留大量可能未使用的存储空间。然而，关键在于妥善管理，因为管理不当可能导致存储空间不足。在高数据写入速率下或未经适当监控的情况下，精简配置的卷可能会迅速消耗物理存储。

Thin provisioning is the fastest way to preallocate storage. Initially, it allocates only the storage space that the virtual machine needs, and then uses available dynamic space to meet growing storage demands.

Compact configuration feature

Here are some of its features:

- Fastest to create, but still has first write cost - Allows over-provisioning - Space efficient - Requires writing zeros before new data can be written to a block - Disk size doesn't shrink when data is deleted

What is "Thick Provision"?

Thick provisioning is the other, equally important, storage pre-allocation scheme. Unlike thin provisioning, which uses dynamic storage allocation, thick provisioning allocates a fixed amount of physical storage to a virtual machine when you create its virtual disk. These virtual disks consume all their allocated space from the beginning, so the space is not available for use by other virtual machines.

This also means that if you create a 50 GB thick-provisioned virtual disk, it will consume 50 GB of physical disk space right away, and that space cannot be used by any other data even if the disk is not written to later.

The type of Thick Provisioning.

Lazynoodles:

Provision the VM with actual physical storage that contains previous data, which is overwritten when new data is written for the first time. This type of pre-provisioned configuration can be created quickly, but the initial write performance can be slow due to increased input/output operations per second (IOPS) for the new blocks.

I'm sorry, I need more context to accurately translate this phrase. Please provide more information or a complete sentence.

≪ li ≫ Uses all the space to create a virtual machine and cleans up old data before writing new data. Unlike Thick Lazy Zeroed, which has faster creation but slower first writes, Thick Eager Zeroed has slower creation but faster first writes.

What is the difference between “thin” and “thick” provisioning?

Thinned provisioning and thick provisioning differ in four ways: storage changes, creation time, initial write performance, and over-provisioning.

Conclusions

Each provisioning option has its pros and cons. Thin provisioning is most space-efficient when creating the virtual disk and takes less time to create, but requires higher levels of monitoring to ensure data safety. Thick provisioning (eager zeroed) offers better performance and relative safety, but takes up more storage space and time to create. Thick provisioning (lazy zeroed) takes less time to create than thick provisioning (eager zeroed), but has lower write speeds and safety.

In summary, when choosing a storage pre-allocation scheme, consider your specific needs and make an informed decision.