Sorry for the seriously stupid question but I read a few times that vdisks just expand as needed, e.g. you create a vdisk at 100G on your cache, install Ubuntu, and it really should only take up ~6GB right?

 

I did a test Ubuntu VM and set a 10G disk just to test with for now, and it shows 10.7G used in my cache when I browse to it, yet the actual used space is just less than 6GB.

 

Is there a way to make the vdisk expand on an as-needed basis? I wanted to install some VMs with ~250GB vdisks but my cache is only 2x 500GB SSDs. 

I don't want to create a VM with 250GB Vdisk and immediately use up half my cache. 

 

Thanks!

Bumping up.

 

Thanks.

Vdisks are sparse by default.

3 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Vdisks are sparse by default.

 

That's what I would have assumed but my 10GB Ubuntu test showed otherwise? When I browse to my cache disk, then the location of the vdisk, it shows 10G

 

When I download/copy the vdisk over the network it copies a 10GB file. 

 

Am I missing something?

2 minutes ago, CorneliousJD said:

When I browse to my cache disk, then the location of the vdisk, it shows 10G

That's normal

 

2 minutes ago, CorneliousJD said:

When I download/copy the vdisk over the network it copies a 10GB file. 

Also normal, copying over LAN will lose its "sparsiness"

 

You can check with:

 

ls -lash

 

This is one of my vdisks, it's 60GB but only 17GB are being used:

 

Quote

root@Tower1:/mnt/cache/VMs/Win10# ls -lsh
total 17G
17G -rw-rw-rw- 1 root users 60G Jan 11 19:29 vdisk1.img

 

Ah, excellent, thank you very much! 

 

I appreciate the input!

For Windows 8/10 and related server releases you can use this to keep the vdisk as sparse as possible:

 

https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/51703-vm-faq/?do=findComment&comment=557606