GMCON wrote:
On the NetApp side are you doing volume snapshots? The problem is that if you have volume snapshots after you delete that data the space is not immediately freed up until those snapshots have been automatically deleted through retention policy or manually deleted.
This is a good point but Netapp snapshots are at the volume level and dont affect the LUN used space which is what the OP is concerned with.
My recommendation would be to create a new 2TB Thin provisioned LUN, present it as a new datastore and Storage vMotion your VM's to it (assuming you have the relevant licensing).
This will only consume an additional 500GB of space on your SAN and you can then destroy the original LUN that is consuming the 1.5TB of space. However, GMCON's point about snapshots now comes into play - if you have snapshots of the LUN then you will only recover the space to the aggregate once all the snapshots in that volume/or the volume itself are deleted.
This will probably only take 2 hours to complete and as you are using the VSC its just a few clicks 