introduce
Choosing a virtual disk format in vCenter also generally depends on your needs and usage.
vSphere supports a variety of virtual disk formats, the following are some common formats:
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Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed: This is the default format in vSphere. It pre-allocates the storage space required by the virtual disk, but only fills the disk space when the virtual machine writes data. This format can be used for performance demanding applications. -
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed: Compared to "lazy fill", this format completely fills the storage space when the virtual disk is initialized. This format can be used in applications that require a forced formatting of the virtual disk, such as Oracle RAC. -
Thin Provision: This format only allocates the storage space that the virtual disk is actually written to, rather than pre-allocating the entire disk space. This format saves storage space, but may have some impact on performance. -
SeSparse: This format is a "compression-on-demand" format that enables efficient storage and retrieval of unusual workloads, such as large data sets, on virtual disks.
If you need higher performance, you can choose between "lazy fill" or "eager fill" formats. If you need to save storage space, you can choose the "Thin Provisioning" format. And if you need efficient storage and retrieval for non-routine workloads, you can choose the "SeSparse" format.
