Thanks Gav0. Yes, the datastore gui shows that used space is 15GB and provisioned space is 100GB. But through some combination of vmware Client and vmware Web Client, I was exporting the actual <mv vm name>-flat.vmdk file from /vms/volumes/volumeid/<my vm name>/ of the esxi host to the local hard disk on my windows box running vcenter. The size of that file is really 105GB. The size of that file on esxi (using ls -la) is really reported as 105GB. Today I used vmware Converter to copy this vm from my esxi host to my local filesystem - and I get what was hoped for - a 15 GB file (<my vm name>.vmdk, not the <my vm name>-flat.vmdk). So I went back to the vmware Client and the Web Client to figure out how I was saving/moving/migrating the vm to the local hard disk and getting the 105GB <name>-flat.vmdk file that is so big. I was unable to find any function to do it, but last friday I found an export function (I remember two disk icons, one with arrow up and one with arrow down) that allowed me to save to the local storage (not a vm datastore). I did it multiple times and it normally timed out, but on the 3rd attempt it copied all 105GB. I cannot find the same screen again in either Web Client or Client. But the new Web Client is so completely unintuitive I'm not surprised. I wish I could figure out where the bogus export function is...but now that I know that Converter works as I need it to, I can move on. Thanks again.
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