Thin provisioned disks and VMFS fragmentation, do I really need to worry?

I’ve seen this myth floating around from time to time and as I never publicly wrote about it I figured it was time to write an article to debunk this myth. The question that is often posed is if thin disks will hurt performance due to fragmentation of the blocks allocated on the VMFS volume. I guess we need to rehash (do a search on VMFS for more info)  some basics first around Think Disks and VMFS volumes…

When you format a VMFS volume you can select the blocksize (1MB, 2MB, 4MB or 8MB). This blocksize is used when the hypervisor allocates storage for the  VMDKs. So when you create a VMDK on an 8MB formatted VMFS volume it will create that VMDK out of 8MB blocks and yes indeed in the case of a 1MB formatted VMFS volume it will use 1MB. Now this blocksize also happens to be the size of the extend that is used for Think Disks. In other words, every time your thin disks needs to expand it will grow in extends of 1MB. (Related to that, with a lazy-thick disk the zero-out also uses the blocksize. So when something needs to be written to an untouched part of the VMDK it will zero out using the blocksize of the VMFS volume.)

--> The rest of the article is on the website :

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/03/08/thin-provisioned-disks-and-vmfs-fragmentation-do-i-really-need-to-worry/