VMware VROOM! Blog

vStorage Thin Provisioning, a key component of VMware vSphere™, is a technology that redefines storage provisioning by allocating space on demand to the virtual disks. We recently published a paper that gives the details of this feature and discusses experiments conducted to study the performance of thin-provisioned disks in a VMware vSphere™ environment.

The data we have collected reveals

• Both thin and thick disks perform similarly on various workloads.
• Thin provisioned disks show similar performance trends as thick disks do when scaled across different hosts.
• External fragmentation has negligible impact on the performance of thin provisioned disks.
• There is insignificant performance impact on existing thick disks if thin provisioning is implemented on a shared array.

The above graph shows that the performance of a thin provisioned disk matches the performance of a thick disk. For more details on the environment of these tests and the experiments conducted we invite you to read the full whitepaper at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf.