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GoingAlone
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials system resources in use

I have one host with VMware vSphere 5 Essentials (esxi5.5) on it using the VMware vSphere Client for administration. I have 3 vm's on it and 2 datastores (300gb and 1.09tb). 2 of the vm's have thin provisioning set with a certain provision size for each disk drive (2 drives for each vm, total provision, 250gb for one and 750gb for the other or 1tb on the 1.09tb store). I show 440gb available but I believe it is not taking into consideration unused or provisioned space for the 2 machines. I had a couple questions:

1. once these drives reach the provisioned size, that's as big as they can get, correct?

2. Is there anything in the vsphere client that can tell me what's in total use, the max usage for the config'ed vm's (which I think is the provision size) and how much resources are left (mainly available disk space) to configure any more vm's. 

Hope this ? makes sense, Thanks for any insight!

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joshopper
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

For question number one, yes that is as big as the .vmdk or harddrive of the machine can get but there will be more space used for other files which can add up, especially if you take or use snapshots you are going to want a buffer between the size of the machines and the capacity of the storage volume.I generally use 20% as a default. Keeping in mind I am pretty diligent about removing snapshots as soon as possible and making sure their lifespan if very short. 

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GoingAlone
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the reply! I normally don't snapshot unless I'm doing sometime to the vm. When complete, I remove them. My backup device does a snapshot but removes it promptly when completed. So the 440gb I'm showing free probably does not reflect all the provisioned space, but only the space in use at the moment? That's why I was wodering if there is a utility built into vsphere that can give you all the resource usage including provisioned space that's not in use yet.


Thanks

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