Hi experts,
I'll be doing P2V migrations using the VMware standalone converter 5.5 tool for a couple of physical servers. Plan to install the converter tool on the source machine itself and convert to target vCenter server with ESXi hosts (all running 5.0) connected to EMC SAN using RAID10 datastores.
what I want to know is - one of the physical servers has 500GB of total disk capacity (C,D and some SAN volumes) however the space utilized is at 140GB. If I convert using thin provisioning for destination disk type, I know the tool uses block based copying (uses file based copying if disk size is reduced) but will the tool copy only the real data (140GB) and is the time required for cloning based on 140GB or the 500GB total disk size of the source server. Cause if I estimate the transfer speed avg as 10MB/s it should take around 3-4 hours to copy only data (140GB) however if it does block based cloning of source server disks totaling 500GB (including empty space) then the time required (approx) could take a whopping 14 hours.....
Question, does block based cloning using thin provisioning as destination disk type copy the entire source disk (including empty space) or does it only copy the used space / actual data??