Unable to deploy a VM with lazy zeroed thick provisioned disk on NFS datastore

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Unable to deploy a VM with lazy zeroed thick provisioned disk on NFS datastore.
• The deployment task completes successfully when lazy zeroed thick provisioning is selected.
• However, the resulting virtual disk is automatically provisioned as eager zeroed thick instead of lazy zeroed thick.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

Virtual disks created on NFS datastores are thin-provisioned by default. To be able to create thick-provisioned virtual disks, hardware acceleration should support the Reserve Space operation.

Resolution

• Navigate to Datastore > configure > Hardware acceleration. Make sure all the hosts are supported.
• Verify if the VAAI plugin is installed on the host 
   
  • SSH to the esxi host 
  • Run "esxcli software vib list"  and look for the storage vendor specific nas plugin.
• Take a reboot of the ESXi host if the vibs are listed on the above command and check if the hardware acceleration changed to supported. 
• Run the command "esxcli software component list" and look for the storage vendor specific nas component. 
• If component not found in the above command, install the plug-in on the ESXi host by running the following commands:
  
  1. /etc/init.d/vaai-nasd stop
      
  2. esxcli software component apply -d /tmp/<Path>/<zipfile>
      
  3. /etc/init.d/vaai-nasd start
• Post which if the issue still persists, engage storage vendor.