Create a Thin Provisioned Disk

Creating thin provisioned disks on managed destinations helps you use the storage space on your datastores more effectively. Thin provisioned disks contain only used space. As the target virtual machine adds data to them, their used space can expand to the original size of the source disk.

You can create thin provisioned disks only for managed destinations that support thin provisioning.

Procedure

1	Select a valid source and a VMware infrastructure destination.

2	On the View/Edit Options page, click Data to copy in the left pane and select the cloning mode.

Option	Description
Copy all disks and maintain layout	Performs disk-based cloning. Disk-based cloning transfers all sectors from all disks and preserves all volume metadata. The destination virtual machine receives the same volumes, of the same type as the volumes of the source virtual machine. Disk-based cloning supports all types of basic and dynamic disks.
Select volumes to copy	Performs volume-based cloning. In volume-based cloning, all volumes in the destination virtual machine are converted to basic volumes, regardless of their type in the corresponding source volume. Volume-based cloning at the file or block level is performed, depending on the volume size you select.

3	Configure the target disk type.

Option	Action
Copy all disks and maintain layout	From the Type drop-down menu of the source disks list, select Thin for the target virtual disk.
Select volumes to copy	a Click Advanced to the right of the Data to copy drop-down menu. b Click the Target Layout tab. c In the Type drop-down menu, select Thin for each volume to convert as thin provisioned.

4	(Optional) If the destination contains more than one datastore, you can use the drop-down menus in the Target Datastore column to select a destination datastore for each target virtual disk.

5	Click Next to view a summary of the conversion task.

6	On the Ready to Complete page, click Finish to add the task to the task list.

Converter Standalone creates thin provisioned disks on the destination datastore. Their initial size is equal to the used space on the source disks.