Determining Virtual Machine's disk provisioning type of VMDK on (VAAI enabled) NAS datastore.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

In some case, you need to determine virtual machine's disk provisioning type such as "Thick (Lazy Zero)" , "Thin", "Eager Zeroed Thick" for the vmdks on VAAI enabled NFS datastore.
Usually you can see this provisioning type on "Editing Virtual Machine settings" in vSphere UI, but you can also use vmkfstools to getting this information from NAS server through VAAI API (Extended Stats).

Environment

vSphere ESXi 8.0 Update 3 or later 

VAAI Plugin is installed on ESXi

NAS(NFS) server support VAAI's and to return an allocation type in Extended Stats API.

Resolution

You can use a 'vmkfstools' command in ESXi 8.0 Update 3 or later to see the disk provisioning type (shown as 'Allocation Type') from NAS Server through VAAI(Extended Stats).

• vSpehre 8.0 Update 3 or later
  
  # vmkfstools --extendedstatinfo thin.vmdk
  Capacity bytes: 8589934592
  Used bytes: 512
  Unshared bytes: 512
  Allocation type: nfs-thin
  
  
• Before the vSphere 8.0 Update 3
  
  # vmkfstools --extendedstatinfo thin.vmdk
  Capacity bytes: 8589934592
  Used bytes: 512
  Unshared bytes: 512

You can also use this tools VMDKs on a VMFS datastore.