How to do Space Reclaimation from a Thin Provisioned LUN using VAAI features?

[srangama]

Hello experts,

I have a VAAI feature supported storage and I want to know how to do space reclaimation from a FC Thinly Provisioned LUN. Basically what we did was, we moved (i.e. Storage vMotion) some Virtual Machines to a new Datastore and some were deleted from the old Datastore.

Although, vCenter reported that space was free in the Datastores, in the storage reported that spcae is still utilized.

In that case, How do I reclaim that Dead Space? What commands do I need to issue? Please help.. Note that I am using both ESX5.0U1 and ESXi5.1.

Actually, I want that dead space to be reclaimed automatically rather than issuing commands manually at ESXi Shell. Here I am refering to the command  vmkfstools -y nn.

Is there any possible way of automating this process? I mean, automatically reclaimed dead space from  thin provisioned FC LUNs? Is there any specific storage system that has VAAI features and also support automatic block reclaimation feature??

Thanks

[ArvindBhargava]

check out below link

download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/guestreclaim/GuestReclaimReadMe.pdf

[mcowger]

This document only helps inside the guest, not when VMDKs have been deleted like what the OP is talking about.

[mcowger]

Using the manual vmkfstools method is the only way to do this currently.

No array supports it automatically, because VMware has not provided any API for vendors to hook into and do it automatically.

So, if you want to automate it, you'll have to do it youself with something like 'cron'.  It would be pretty simple:

cd /vmfs/volumes

for volume in `ls`; do

     cd $volume

     vmkfstools -y 90

     cd ..

done