Vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space
- #VMWARE ESXI 5 RECLAIMING THIN PROVISIONED DISK UNUSED SPACE MANUAL#
- #VMWARE ESXI 5 RECLAIMING THIN PROVISIONED DISK UNUSED SPACE FREE#
I know that for Service Providers that thin provision but charge based on allocated storage, they will benefit greatly from this feature as it automates a mechanism that was complex at best in previous releases. So my initial testing with this new feature shows that it’s a valued and welcomed edition to the new vSphere 6.5 release. You can see that I clawed back about 22GB and 14GB on both datastores in the first 24 hours. 81 Datacenter -datacenter -2 LAB-DC -01 Folder -group -s5 datastore vmstores : \ lab -vc -01. Heading over the hosts command line I checked the reclamation config using the new esxcli namespace:įileSystemVersion DatacenterId Datacenter ParentFolderId ParentFolder DatastoreBrowserPath FreeSpaceMB CapacityMB Accessible Type StorageIOControlĦ.81 Datacenter-datacenter-2 LAB-DC-01 Folder-group-s5 datastore 253194 457728 True VMFS FalseĦ.81 Datacenter-datacenter-2 LAB-DC-01 Folder-group-s5 datastore 76005 457728 True VMFS FalseĦ.81 Datacenter-datacenter-2 LAB-DC-01 Folder-group-s5 datastore 275073 457728 True VMFS FalseĦ.81 Datacenter-datacenter-2 LAB-DC-01 Folder-group-s5 datastore 90534 457728 True VMFS FalseĦ. I was interested in seeing if this worked as advertised, so I went about formatting a new VMFS6 datastore with the default options via the Web Client as shown below: esxcli storage core device vaai status get -d naa. To confirm that unmap/reclaim is supported, we need to run the following command from a SSH session to the host. The guest operating systems that do not support automatic unmaps might require user intervention. In a thin provisioned Datastore before ESXi 6.5 in format VMFS 5, we need to reclaim unused storage blocks manually. Many guest operating systems can send the unmap command and do not require any additional configuration.
#VMWARE ESXI 5 RECLAIMING THIN PROVISIONED DISK UNUSED SPACE FREE#
On VMFS6 datastores, ESXi supports automatic asynchronous reclamation of free space. VMFS6 generally supports automatic space reclamation requests that generate from the guest operating systems, and passes these requests to the array. VMFS uses the SCSI unmap command to indicate to the array that the storage blocks contain deleted data, so that the array can unallocate these blocks.
When storage space is deleted without this automated feature the delete operation leaves blocks of unused space on the datastore. ESXi 6.5 supports automatic space reclamation (SCSI unmap) that originates from a VMFS datastore or a Guest OS…the mechanism reclaims unused space from VM disks that are thin provisioned. At a Guest OS level, storage space is freed when you delete files on a thinly provisioned VMDK and then exists as dead or stranded space.
#VMWARE ESXI 5 RECLAIMING THIN PROVISIONED DISK UNUSED SPACE MANUAL#
This feature was enabled in a manual way for VMFS5 datastores and was able to be triggered when you free storage space inside a datastore when deleting or migrating a VM…or consolidate a snapshot.
See the Knowledge Base article for details.One of the cool newly enabled features of vSphere 6.5 is the come back of VMFS storage space reclamation. vmdk should only have the size of the data currently stored on it. Note that the alternative method, migrating the VMs to a different datastore, only frees up space when the blocksize differs on the datastores!Īfterwards the. Run vmkfstools -K on the local ESXi console or via SSH.Zero out the disk space inside the VM with one of the suggested tools.You can then use the vmkfstools -K command (ESXi/ESX 4.1 and later) to complete the block reclaim or use Storage vMotion to migrate the virtual machine to a datastore with different VMFS block size. It is then, that the disk can be properly thinned. Use of freeware secure file deletion utilities are useful, such as Eraser or SDelete to zero out the space to 'zero' the free space on the volume, effectively clearing the free space of data. VMwares knowledge base gives these instructions:ĭeletion of files in most file systems will not completely remove them merely file tables will be altered. vmdk size to the actual used space size, is called "thinning". vmdk files don't shrink by themselves when data is deleted, they always maintain the size of their maximum fill state.