Question about prompt before deleting VM from ESXi 4.0 RAID5

[maxiscaleit]

Just wanted to get a confirmation thatI'm not going to blow away resources being used by additional VMs on my server, when I choose "remove from disk" for a single VM. The warning prompt is a bit confusing.

Our ESXi 4.0 server is running on a single server box with six local drives drives configured in RAID5. All the individual VMs are statically provisioned on top of the RAID. When I choose 'Delete From Disk" I'm prompted with the confirmation warning:

+ 'Are you sure you want to delete 'host.domain.com' and it's associated base disks? If other VMs are sharing these base disks, they will no longer have access to these disks.+'

I just want to make sure that the way this is interpreted is that only the provisioned space that was configured for this VM will be reclaimed by ESXi for other use, and not the actual physical RAID disks that this one VM is using, that are shared by all the other VMs running on this same server. I'm asusming that this is the case, but as I'm new to working with ESXi 4.0, I don't want to take any chances.

[DSTAVERT]

You will just be deleting the vmdk's and other files associated with that virtual machine. You can use "remove from inventory" and then manually remove using the datastore browser as well.

[AndreTheGiant]

As written before there are two ways to remove an object (VM or vmdk): remove from inventory (it leave the data on the VMFS) or delete from disk (it remove the data from disk).

If you want to free space, choose the second option.

Andre

[notRoman]

There does not appear to be a GUI for determining what machines a drive (vmdk) is associated with. Does someone know a way to see that so that we can know for sure if the base disk is being shared without examining the settings/configuration of every virtual machine one by one? I'd like it to tell me if it's used rather than the other way around.