NFS Volume Showing Incorrect Provisioned Space.

[justinsmith]

I have a 1TB NFS Volume on a NetApp that is showing 284GB of free space, with 739GB's free... the problem is, the Datastore is empty.

We currently "ran out of space" on it, but come to find out, it wasnt really out of space. After evacuating VM's from the volume, we assumed it would be free space 900GB'sish. But its not. We have no snapshots, VSC isnt doing anything.

I've mounted the volume to a Linux machine (since its NFS) and here's the output:

Filesystem                                     Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

NFSCONTROLLER:/vol/DSNAME  1.0T  739G  286G  73% /mnt

Here's a LS command on the mount point:

linux# ls -al

total 16

drwxrwxrwx  4 root root 4096 May 16 09:48 .

drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Feb 13 11:00 ..

drwxrwxrwx  2 root root 4096 Aug 23  2012 .snapshot

drwx------  3 root root 4096 May  2  2012 .vSphere-HA

The NetApp sees the same space free/used on that side as well. Not sure what else to do besides call support.

[weinstein5]

How did you evacuate the VMs?

[justinsmith]

Storage vMotion....

[squebel]

Did you ever find any more information regarding this issue. We seem to be having the same exact problem with our NFS exports from a Netapp filer as well. We've been racking our minds trying to figure out what is going on with no real idea.

[SatyS]

Hey,

You have moved your VMs using Storage vMotion.But if you have provisioned your VMs as thin provisioned disks,even if you move the files using storage vmotion,you cant see the space as free.

If you delete a file on a  Datastore, the file system marks the affected blocks as unoccupied and reusable.

Unfortunately this information is not passed on to the storage system which believes that the free blocks are actually still in use.

You can use vmkfsools to  release a desired percentage of the free memory

You can go through

http://www.running-system.com/how-to-reclaim-dead-space-from-thin-provisioned-vmfs-datastores/

Hope  this helps

-SatyS

[jrmunday]

Have you checked your filer snapshots are not occupying this space? I see this regularly with NetApp NFS datastores ... In my environment the snapshots consume the space which then trigger storage DRS to evacuate the datastore. When I look at the datastore it's empty but reports heaps of used ... I generally just ask the storage team to flush the snapshots barring the most recent and all is well again.

Cheers,

Jon