Optical measurements have been used to study the biaxial tensile strain in heteroeptaxial ZnTe epilayers on the (100) GaAs substrate by hot wall epitaxy (HWE) with Zn reservoir. It is effect on the low-temperature photoluminescence spectrum of the material. Optimum growth condition has been determined by a four-crystal rocking curve (FCRC) and a low temperature photoluminescence measurement (PL). It was found that Zn partial pressure from Zn reservoir has a strong influence on the quality of grown films. Under the determined optimum growth condition, ZnTe epitaxial films with thickness of 0.72~24.8$mu extrm{m}$ were grown for studying the effect of the thickness on crystalline quality. The PL and FCRC results indicated that the quality of ZnTe films becomes higher rapidly with increase of thickness up to 6$mu extrm{m}$. The best value of the FWHM of the four crystal rocking curve, 66 arcsec, was obtained on the film with 12$mu extrm{m}$ in thickness. The PL spectrum shows the splitted strong free exciton emissions and very weak deep band emissions. These results show the high quality of films.