After expanding a thick provisioned eager zeroed disk with vmkfstools vCenter is not showing the proper size of the disk

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Using vmkfstools to expand a disk results the expanded size being seen in the guest operating system, however vCenter shows the vmdk as the size before expansion

Example:

vmkfstools -X 1792G -d eagerzeroedthick VMNAME/VMNAME_1.vmdk
Guest operating system shows the virtual disk is now 1.756 TB, vCenter shows the virtual disk 1.5 TB

Environment

vSphere (ESXi and vCenter server) all versions

Cause

The vCenter server, ESXi host(s), and guest operating system are out of sync.

When a change is made directly on a host or a virtual machine and not via the vCenter interface the changed information is not pushed to vCenter.

Resolution

Three options are available as allowing vCenter to sync with the host owning a virtual machine, or forcing vCenter to reload the VM configuration will result in the correct data being displayed

1. Wait for the vCenter and host to sync up information about changes made. Depending on the change this sync may occur after some time or may not occur at all
2. Compute only vMotion between hosts. The migration reloads the VM information which will be reflected correctly in the vCenter UI
3. Reregister the VM(s) by powering off the guest VM(s), removing from inventory, adding back to inventory. On reloading the updated information will be displayed