Datastore Summary - Capacity information

[salogni63]

Hello all,

Hopefully this is a fairly simple one.  I'm examining the storage information available in vSphere -> Home -> Inventory -> Datastores by selecting an individual datastore and clicking the "Summary" tab.  The "Capacity" box is what's confusing me.  I would expect Provisioned Space + Free Space = Capacity, and this is the case for some datastores but not all.  Some datastores have more Provisioned Space + Free Space than they do Capacity, which I would have previously thought impossible.

Am I misunderstanding what Provisioned Space means or is there something wierd going on here?

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Sounds like you have disks with thin provisioning on these datastores.

Good Luck!

[salogni63]

Thanks vmroyale!  That was one of my suspicions.

So my next question is will Capacity - Free Space tell me how much space is truly being used on these datastores?

[mittim12]

yes, your capacity - the listed free space should be the amount of actual utilized space.  

[salogni63]

Many thanks to both of you.