Cisco UCS Server ESXi 5.5 / 6 Reclaim VMFS deleted blocks on thin-provisioned LUNs

[Chi Fai Leung]

Hi,

I want to reclaim the disk space, which was deleted on the VMs (thin-provisioned LUNs).

I checked my UCS servers, that is not supported Hardware Acceleration, that mean the UCS servers is not supported on VAAI and cannot reclaim the disk space?

Ref.: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/04/vaai-thin-provisioning-block-reclaimunmap-in-action

[Kirk J]

VAAI support is not a compute/host 'support' issue, but is a matter of having a compatible storage system that provides it, and having the correct VAAI plugin installed from the storage vendor.

Please review: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1021976

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=2014849

https://kb.netapp.com/support/s/article/ka21A0000000kA0QAI/what-vaai-configurations-are-supported-on-data-ontap-storage-controllers?language=en_US

https://mysupport.netapp.com/documentation/productlibrary/index.html?productID=61278 <<<<<This is an example of where you could download the VAAI plugin for your netapp array.

Link if you have EMC storage array: https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-13309

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Chi Fai Leung]

Can you reclaim the deleted disk space of thin provisional VMs on the local hard disk of UCS server?

[Kirk J]

You may want to try storage vmotion-ing the guestVM to another datastore.  Have seen other references to vmware converter as well for this.

This is a VMware level feature, and not specifically related to UCS, or underlying hardware.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[Chi Fai Leung]

Actually, I have some Windows Servers of VMs, which were thin provision.
For example, A Windows Server had stored 100G files and I deleted the 100G files, but the datastore will not free up the disk space, so I want to reclaim the disk space.

My friend is using the HP server, which can been reclaimed the free space. May I know any missing on my UCS server?