How do I reclaim space from thin provisioned VMDK?

Reclaiming disk space is a two steps process

Table of Contents

Step 1: Delete the blocks on the Guest OS. Windows Operating System. Download SDelete Command Line Tool available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete.
Step 2: Reclaim space on VMFS. Power off the virtual machine.

How do I reclaim VMFS deleted blocks on thin provisioned LUNs?

Reclaim VMFS deleted blocks on thin-provisioned LUNs

First get the naa ID from the affected LUN. You can do this by using the command:
To confirm if SCSI UNMAP is supported on a LUN, open an SSH session to a host and run this command:
if deleted status supported run following command to reclaim free space.

Do thin provisioned disks shrink?

How do I reduce provisioned space in VMware?

You can try a Storage vMotion and select thin provisioning on the destination route:

Right-click the virtual machine, and click Migrate.
Click Change datastore.
Click Next, and select a datastore that is not the same as the current datastore.
From the dropdown, select the Thin Provision virtual disk format.

How do I reclaim Datastore?

The first step is to identify the datastore(s) from which you want to reclaim storage. We will need the device name, and later the UUID. The next step is to identify if the device is detected as a thin-provisioned disk, and if it is VAAI-capable. I’ve shortened the output of the esxcli output to the necessary output.

Can you shrink a thin provisioned disk?

Having thin provisioned disk is usually no longer a performance problem so it is a valid design choice even in production. A common issue with thin disks is that the size will grow when required, but never shrink. When you require the capacity only once you might want to get it back from the virtual machine.

What does inflate VMDK do?

Recently I had a request come through from a client to change a Virtual Machine’s disk from Thin to Thick provisioned. 5. This will then inflate the drive up to the provisioned size you had originally selected when you created the drive.

How do I increase hard disk space in VMware virtual machine ESXi?

For ESX 3.5 or later:

Open VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client and connect to VirtualCenter or the ESX host.
Right-click the virtual machine.
Click Edit Settings.
Select Virtual Disk.
Increase the size of the disk.

Can we convert thin provisioned disk to thick?

To change vmdk from Thin to Thick provisioning Power off the virtual machine. In vSphere Client, right-click the virtual machine in the inventory. Click Edit Settings to display the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box. Select the appropriate hard disk in the Hardware list.

What is space reclamation?

In a thinly provisioned environment, space reclamation completes the process of freeing space from the storage system that has been freed in the host file system.

What is space reclamation VMware?

VMware space reclamation As soon as any information is deleted from storage, the blocks are also freed. But arrays do not know about this and so these blocks remain marked as “taken”. The space reclamation function helps the array to understand that it is time to free the blocks, since there are no data any more.

Where should I run Esxcli commands?

You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference.

How do I access Esxcli?

Accessing the local ESXi Shell

If you have direct access to the host, press Alt+F1 to open the log in page on the machine’s physical console.
Provide credentials when prompted. Note: To return to the Direct Console User Interface press Alt-F2.

Can you expand a thin provisioned disk?

Lack of Elasticity Although thin provisioning lets you expand your disk space as you need it, the technology isn’t elastic. In other words, you can expand your space allocation, but you can’t contract it.

What is inflate thin provisioned disk?

A virtual disk in thin format uses only as much space on the datastore as needed. This means that, if you create a 10 GB virtual disk and place 3 GB of data in it, only the 3 GB of space on the datastore will be used, but the performance will not be as good as with the other two disk types.

How do I expand my VM disk space?

To enlarge a virtual machine’s hard disk in VMware, power off the virtual machine, right-click it, and select Virtual Machine Settings. Select the virtual hard disk device in the list, click the Utilities button, and click Expand to expand the hard disk. Enter a larger maximum disk size and click the Expand button.

How do I reclaim space on a vmdk disk?

That said, reclaiming the space is a two step process: 1 First, we need to instruct the operating system to overwrite the ‘freed’ blocks with zeros. This essentially destroys… 2 Next, we get ESXi to look for any ‘zero’ blocks of data occupied by the VMDK disk, and release that free space back to… More

How to recover thin provisioned space from a VM?

Problems Reclaiming Thin Provisioned Space 1 Run SDelete -z in the VM to zero out the free space 2 Migrate the VM to a datastore with a different block size than the original 3 Run “esxcli storage vmfs unmap -u ” on the ESXi host against the original datastore 4 Migrate the VM back to the original datastore More

What are thin provisioned vmdks?

Thin provisioned disks are designed to expand and consume more disk space as the virtual machine requires. Unfortunately, as you can see, thin VMDKs only expand. They don’t shrink on their own to release freed disk space.

How to reduce the size of the VMDK?

Only and easy way to reduce the size of the VMDK is to us vmware standalone convetor and do V2V, during disk size mention the required size. 12-20-2011 09:42 PM