From all the 3par/vmware documentation I could find, it was recommended to run eager thick for performance, but then you can still leverage the benefits of thin with having 3par handle it all and run their thin persistence/stay thin suite.
From what I read up on having both go thin can lead to management nightmares (especially with a test environment like ours) and that they state eager thick gives you a performance boost even on 3par thin. If this is wrong I would love to hear more about this as this decision was made based solely on the 3par documentation/recommendations.
EDIT: To answer your question, this array goes to all esxi 5.1 hosts (~160) with a few RDMs, but it is by far mostly vmfs LUNs. We have ~12 hosts per cluster with ~4-6 512gb LUNs to each cluster.
EDIT2: via
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partner ... erv-so.pdfVMware recommends using “Eager Zeroed Thick” (EZT) virtual disks. EZT disks have the smallest overhead but require zeros to be written across all of the capacity of the VMDK at the time of creation. Unlike many other storage vendors, HP 3PAR Thin Persistence Software and HP 3PAR Zero Detect enabled virtual volumes allow clients to retain the thin provisioning benefits when using Eager Zeroed Thick VMDKs without sacrificing any of the performance benefits offered by this VMDK option. Please see the
Virtual SCSI adapters and virtual disk types section of this document for a comparison of the available disk types with VMware vSphere 5.