VMware disk cloning

Using free VMware vSphere Hypervisor doesn’t give us a chance to easily clone virtual machines disks and cope with thin provision disks. But we could leverage administration to CLI (shell) and there we have command called: vmkfstools. This command is used to manage virtual disks i.e. create, convert, repair. To clone virtual disk to thin provision format:

vmkfstools <source_path_to_vmdk> -d thin <destination_path_to_cloned_vmdk>

in result we get thin provisioned disk with proper disk consumed space on datastore in contrast to i.e simple cp command. More info on:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1028042