One of the interesting new features in vSPhere is vStorage Thin Provisioning. I’m not going to explain what Thin Provisioning is all about. For that you can consult several knowledgeable blogs (for example this entry on Virtual Geek) and/or books (for example Scott Lowe’s excellent Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0).
The problem I have with Thin Provisioning, is that there are a lot of existing guests and templates out there that were created with Thick VMDKs in the past. The only documented way I could find to convert these Thick VMDKs to Thin VMDKs was to use svMotion from the vSphere client.
Now that is not a solution I want to (or can) use in an automated environment. Continue reading Thick to Thin with PowerCLI and the SDK