Hi All
Quick run up of our environment:
VMware V5.0.0 Update 3 Build 1918656 with vCenter 5.0.0 U3.
NetApp FAS8020 running Data ONTAP 8.2.1 7-Mode using Thin Provisioning Flex Volumes
Using VSC 4.2.2 plugin
For purposes of test this piece I created a thin provisioned 100GB LUN with a 55GB thin provisioned VM
I am looking to use the unmap to reclaim space from our thin provisioned volumes on our NetApp, we are using thin provisioned VM disks however some are thick provisioned VMs as well. When I mean the volume is thin provisioned I mean when you setup a new volume on the NetApp array and tick the option to thin provision the volume as shown below:
however I have run into a few problems and am struggling to understand why I am unable to reclaim space on a test thin provisioned volume I created.
As a test I storage vmotioned a VM no longer needed to a test volume which utilised the space on the LUN, I then storage vmotioned it back to another volume. it removed the space on the VMware datastore side however not on the volume capacity on the storage. However having a read of VAAI in detail I am unsure why the below is showing as thin provisioning status: unknown. I can confirm the volume is thin provisioned and NOT thick provisioned.
When looking at the VAAI status it shows the delete as unsupported.
So I attempt to use the vmkfstools command to reclaim the space:
cd/vmfs/volumes/55965500-d4fc0353-ce8c-c4346bbae697
When I tried the vmkfstools -y percentage_of_deleted_blocks_to_reclaim command it looked like it worked, tried it few different times with different %
Volume status on NetApp side shows that the space hasn't been recovered and still shows at 39% used, with 61.28GB even though there are no VMs on this volume.
On VMware side, it shows as space feed as expected.
Does anyone know why I might be seeing this behaviour? I know on earlier versions of 5.0 there was issues and it has to be run manually however I am on a much later release of 5.0 and I thought the vmfkstool utility allowed it to be run manually?
Any help would be most appreciated.
Thanks