This video shows the differences and impact to your Nutanix environment when selecting Thin Provisioned vs Thick Provisioned Lazy Zero vs Thick Provisioned Eager Zero vdisk formats in the VMware vSphere ESXi hypervisor and Nutanix as your backend platform.
Nutanix typically recommends your provision all disks as the Thin Provisioned type, when using ESXi as the hypervisor, and this video shows why.
Also keep in mind that best practices change and a best practice is not true for 100% of the use cases. If you do have an application / use case that requires thick provisioned it will still work on Nutanix. But, many software vendors do not understand the ramifications of thick vs thin and are just running off information from 2004. So if someone tells you they "require" thick vmdks and you are running on Nutanix, get them to explain why and make sure it makes sense.
VMs running on Nutanix with ESXi as the hypervisor do NOT perform better with thick vdisks vs thin. Maybe that was true back in the ESX 3 days but not anymore. Not to mentioned most traditional storage providers have all sorts of "intelligence" that pretty much make thick vs thin on their platforms useless as well.
On Nutanix, stick with thin.
*disclaimer*
This document and presentation is my own and does not represent anything from any other entity. I will not be held liable for anything bad that comes of it.
Written by Eric Wamsley
Posted: June 12th, 2019 2:09PM