Hi,
Can some confirm or correct me on my understanding of potential areas that require disk reclamation in a vsphere environment? Also have a few questions. As far as I know, reclamation can happen at 2 levels:
1. at the guest OS level when thin provisioned vmdk's are used
2. at the esxi hypervisor level when the LUNs on the SAN are thin provisioned
Further clarification For #1....This becomes necessary when space is allocated within the vm and then deleted withing the vm. To reclaim this, it is required to have vm-hw version 11, EnableBlockDelete=1 on hosts, esxi 6, thin provisioned vmdks, and guest OS that is capable of recognizing thin disks. But what guest OS's are capable? I've read some articles saying that windows 2008+ are capable; others that only windows 2012 R2+. What about Linux? Lastly, is it required for esxi 6.0 to have CBT disabled? What about 6.5?
Further clarification on #2....This becomes necessary when a vm is storage vmotioned from one datastore to another or when snapshots are consolidated. I know starting with esx 5.0 U1, this became a manual process to perform (vmkfstools or esxcli storage unmap)....is this still true as of esxi 6.0 and 6.5?
Thanks in advance