Thin Provisioned VMDKs on NFS datastores report as Thick Provisioned in GUI

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Thin Provisioned VMDKs on NFS datastores report as Thick Provisioned in GUI.
• You do not see any errors in the vCenter logs.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0

Cause

This issue occurs due to incorrect information provided by NFS array.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, contact your NFS array vendor technical support.

Workaround:

To work around this issue, perform any of these steps:

• Perform a thinning operation on the Guest OS disks and run unmap on the ESXi host command-line. For more information, see Growing, thinning, and shrinking virtual disks for VMware ESX and ESXi and Using the esxcli storage vmfs unmap command to reclaim VMFS deleted blocks on thin-provisioned LUNs.

 

• Use the NFS array vendor provided vSphere plugin to reclaim space.