Disks
Disks are the containers of data as the disks are used to store data in it for any computing purposes. When we talk about physical computer, the system itself comes with a reasonable amount of disk space for the basic computing operations. We can attach additional disks to physical computers later, based on the need. When it comes to virtualization, the disk will be shared by a number of virtual machines as the virtual disks could be created for each virtual machines available on the host computer. Because of the shared environment, the effective use of disks varies, based on the needs and importance of the virtual machine that runs. For example the virtual disks space of a virtual machine should not impact the other machines that are available in the shared pool because its doesn’t have much importance, or a virtual machine itself should not get impacted in term of I/O speed and deviation on handling workloads and needs to be functional without any interruption and so on. So to avoid the later problems over storage interruption, deciding the type of disk for the virtual machine at the time of its creation will be better.
Let us have a brief overview on the types of disk available in the VMware environment and what could be chosen based on the needs.
There are commonly three types of disks available
1→ Eager Zeroed Thick
2→ Lazy Zeroed Thick
3→ Thin Disk
Eager Zeroed Thick
An Eager Zeroed Thick disk will wipe all the previous data that are available on the physical disk at the time of creation. This types of disk usually takes longer time to create as all the blocks are made Zeroed at the time of creation itself and the disk space will be reserved and unavailable for other uses. When you want to have a high performance VM in terms of I/O processing and to handle the workload you can go for this type of disk.
Lazy Zeroed Thick
Unlike the Eager Zeroed Thick disk, the Lazy Zeroed Thick disk can have any stale data on the physical disk at the time of creation. But all the disk space will be allocated at the time of creation itself and the disk space will be reserved and unavailable for other uses. In this types of disks when a new block is going to be written then the specific block will be Zeroed first and then the data will be written. It has the advantage of time availability to move any existing data that are available on the disk. If you want to have an high performance data and no need to have all the available space to the VM as it can allocate based on the need automatically then you can for this type of disk.
Thin Disk
It’s kind of dynamic disk where only the used space of the disk will be allocated with the VM and the remaining available space of the VM will also be available for VM’s in the shared environment. The space required for the thin disk will be allocated dynamically and Zeroed on demand as the space used. If you want to have a dynamic disk and also want to limit space utilization then you can go for this type of disks.
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