vCenter DataStore alarms

[Mango96701]

What is Best Practice % capacity setting to use in vCenter/DataStore/alerts definition to advise us when a datastore reaches low capacity? 5%, 10%, 20%???

[mittim12]

I think best practice is 10 or 15% free for your datastores.

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[Mango96701]

do you know where this is documented?

[ProPenguin]

After doing a little looking I came accross this document that talks about default alerts and an alert not added by default concerning the datastores. It is a VMWare document. Check out page 6 of this document. Hopefully this helps you.

Link: Document

[mittim12]

I'm sure I read it in some kind of document but I can't remember which. The document linked agove has 25% and 15% as the defaults for the datastore so it's not a bad place to start. All in all it's up to the admin as to what is going to work in your environment and what's not. We have some datastores that we don't utilize snapshots and all they hold are secondary drives for VM's. I'm more likely to let them get lower then a datastore that we are doing a lot of snapshots on.

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[RParker]

5%, think about it logically, VM's are typically around 20-40GB each. Now say you have 1TB VMFS datastore, 10% is 100GB. So that means you are wasting the equivalent of 2 VM's. 5% is less than 50GB, that's more like.

20%... that's just a waste, and very annoying since who keeps 20% in reserve across datastores?

[RParker]

do you know where this is documented?

I don't think it is, since every environment is different, it's a recommendation, you don't really need it at all.. disable it, it's just a warning..

[ProPenguin]

I think that it all depends on your situation. There isnt a magic number. Where 5% for a terabyte would be great, 5% of 200Gigs probably isn't. If you utilize the snapshot feature, I would recommend setting the

option to a higher percentage in order to keep adequate space for the

snapshots. The last thing you want to do is to use up all of your

space. I think what you probably should do is really analyze, and think about your situation. Then do what you feel is best. As long as you have something reasonable in place you should be just fine.

[Mango96701]

many thanks. I kinda knew there wouldn't be a hard and fast reply...but, getting a feel for what is appropriate was good