I’m on training this week with my team, on the vSphere Fast Track 4.0 course as a pre-requisite for the VCP 4 exam (I missed the upgrade window… !) and conversations with the trainer led me to dig out a number of posts I’ve found very useful since vSphere’s release:

From the Official VMware Performance Blog – Performance Study of VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning – straight from the horses mouth a good doc on comparing thin vs thick vs eagerzero. Spoiler – Eagerzero wins!

Chad Sakac, VP of the VMware Tech Alliance at EMC is someone who has a lot of good contacts and seems to be able to get the best information on a subject concatenated into a single (albeit long post). Some interesting posts of his are Where should you thin provision and the Multivendor iSCSI post (which is by EMC, VMWare, HP, Netapp and Dell; there are NFS and VI3 ones also).

There’s also a couple of Thin Provisioning posts I’d found interesting over a VCritical – Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere and The Last Resort – PowerShell Prevents Datastore Emergencies. Though to be honest, I don’t see why one would need to worry about this at the Datastore level if they don’t overallocate at the vSphere layer and instead manage at the SAN instead.