vexxhost / vexxhost/migratekit

Feature Request: Detect and Optimize for Thin-Provisioned VMDKs

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Dominant language
Go
Stars
138
Forks
40
Avg merge
1m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

Feature Summary:
Enhance MigrateKit to detect thin-provisioned VMDKs and optionally optimize data transfer by skipping unused or zeroed blocks, reducing migration time and storage usage.

Why It's Needed:
Currently, MigrateKit transfers all allocated blocks, regardless of actual usage. For thin-provisioned disks, this leads to inefficiencies, especially when most of the disk is unused. Detecting thin-provisioned disks and integrating sparse-aware copy logic would make migrations faster and more bandwidth-efficient.

Proposed Enhancements:

Detection of VMDK type (thin/thick):

    Use pyVmomi to inspect VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo.thinProvisioned.

    Log provisioning type during pre-migration checks.

Sparse-aware Copying (Optional Feature Flag):

    Enable a --sparse-aware flag to:

        Skip zeroed blocks,

        Or use APIs that natively support sparse copies (if VDDK allows).

Logging & Warnings:

    Warn when thick disks are encountered (optional),

    Provide a report of total vs used disk space to visualize savings.

Benefits:

Reduced migration time,

Lower bandwidth usage,

Improved performance especially for large, thin-provisioned VMs.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the pre-migration checks and current VMDK transfer path, then review how pyVmomi exposes VirtualDiskFlatVer2BackingInfo.thinProvisioned and whether VDDK supports sparse copies. Done means thin and thick disks are detected and logged, the --sparse-aware behavior is defined and validated, and reporting or warnings match the agreed scope.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go, python
Domain
cloud, infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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