Editing Storage (section)

== Capacity ==
Needless to say, the old adage when it comes to storage you will inevitably find that you never have enough! It is perfectly possible to run a homelab in around 500GB of usable capacity, with which you can indeed get a lot done, but it is recommended that if you use your lab on a semi-regular basis or more, you procure at least 1TiB of storage for your lab. It doesn't all have to be blazing fast of course, but having a little flash in the mix will improve things.

Don't forget the basics of storage when it comes to capacity design:
* Converting a 1000 GB drive (storage industry typical lie of selling things in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal Base 10]), into real capacity ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number Base 2]), you only get around 93% of your procured capacity.
* You do not want to use more than around 85-90% of your formatted / usable capacity as you need to avoid running the risk of running out altogether, and leave some space for things like snapshots, vswp files, etc.
* In a homelab you are not running production systems, so could use thin provisioning with "thin on thin", i.e. thin at the storage end, and thin at the virtual machine disk file, however this can be a nightmare to manage, so you probably want to pick "thin on thick", or "thick on thin" to simplify things. If you are running a system which supports [http://cormachogan.com/2015/05/07/vsphere-6-0-storage-features-part-8-vaai-unmap-changes/ VAAI and UNMAP], then as long as you use thin VMDK files, then space will be reclaimed automatically regardless of thick or thin at the array end.