Thin Provision Really?

tohadlock · December 31, 2023

So I'm used to thin provisioned VM's from another product.

I just installed a couple of servers with Citrix Hypervisor and selected thin disk.

So when I deploy a VM with say 100GB of disk it always shows as 100GB.

Is that just the way its shown in the Citrix XenCenter?

Is it really only taking up with the VM says like 30GB on the host disk?
All storage is local RAID sets.

Jeff Riechers · January 2

Xenserver thin provisioning is only on GFS2, NFS, or SMB SRs unfortunately.

tohadlock · January 3

On 1/2/2024 at 6:19 AM, Jeff Riechers1709152667 said:

Xenserver thin provisioning is only on GFS2, NFS, or SMB SRs unfortunately.

So during the installation, I should be able to skip the secondary RAID and add it later as GFS2 so that at least the VM storage is thin provisioned?

Jeff Riechers · January 3

I am not sure if you can do GFS2 with only a single host. I believe the minimum is 3, but feel free to take it for a spin to see if it works for you.

Boby John1709155536 · January 5

Go to Host > Local Storage > Type

If it shows Ext - it should be Thin Provisioned and should show only the used space

If it shows LVM - it should be Thick Provisioned and should show the allocated space

You would need a minimum 3 hosts to run GFS2

Else you can use an external NFS Storage which is also Thin provisioned by default

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