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Virtual provisioning behavior with VMWare
Hi,
I'm starting to test VP LUNs presented to ESX 3.5 .
Here is the scenario:
- One VM(win 2003) of 265GB with 75GB of free space inside the VM.
- One Thin pool with a thin device of 500GB.
We have storagevmotionned the VM to this new thin device. Usage in the pool was 270GB. I ran a space reclaimation and the usage went down to 250GB. I was expecting it to go down around 200GB.
From readings I've found that the zeroedthick format is the VP friendly one and I was expecting that since the blocks are not initialized my real usage in the thin pool would have been 200GB.
Do you gus know how it's supposed to behave ? Could it be related to the version of ESX ?
Thanks
codyhosterman
286 Posts
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November 9th, 2011 08:00
It will only reclaim completely-zeroed out blocks so if Windows allocated those blocks for whatever reason with non-zero data (at any point) Symmetrix zero-based reclaim will not be able de-allocate them. So i would say that the free space in your windows volume is non-zero (previously deleted data or paging files or temporary files etc...) So what I would recommend is running the sDelete program within your Windows VM (downloadable from Microsofts website) which will zero out all of your free space. Then re-run the zero reclamation process on that TDEV. I will suspect that you will see much closer to the 200GB of used space at that point.
Hope this helps
Cody
sauravrohilla
859 Posts
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November 13th, 2011 10:00
Just to add to Cody's justification, we do have primus article on this emc277013. Hope this helps..
regards,
Saurabh