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rboteler
Contributor
Contributor

Disk Space Query

This may be a silly thing to mention, however hopefully someone can shed some light for me.

Our san has several luns all formatted with VMFS 3.21 however the disk space appears to be reported wrong.

For example: our system LUN is 273.25GB and has 61.80 GB free within the VI client under the configuration tab.

However if i add up the total disks configured on the lun (under the vm config page) they have used a total of 334.52.

Does Vmware compress the disks/ or only show the used disk space?

Thanks,

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9 Replies
BenConrad
Expert
Expert

If you see inconsistencies in VC try logging into the Console OS and run 'vdf -h' to see what the hosts say about space used.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Are you thin disk provisioning?

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

Are all of the VM disks on the same datastore?

-KjB

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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rboteler
Contributor
Contributor

have just checked from the esx hosts console and it reporting the same ammout as vc.

Where do I check to se if thin disk provisioning is enabled on my disks?

Yes they are all on the same data store.

Thanks for the quick replies btw

V impressed Smiley Happy

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

You can't use thin provisioning in a VMFS datastore, only NFS mounted datastore.

Go to the service console, and cd into your /vmfs/volumes/<datastore> folder.

Run vdf -h and post

Run vmkfstools -P /vmfs/volumes/<datastore>

Run du -sh * and post

We can compare the two and see if there is a difference.

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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rboteler
Contributor
Contributor

Managed to run this "Run vdf -h and post" and got the following:

However i am struggling to get "vmkfstools -P /vmfs/volumes/"

Perhaps I am using the wrong syntax but i keep getting "invalid block length or specifier" the syntax that I am using is "vmkfstools -P /vmfs/volumes/VMFS-SYSTEM"

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

Ok, that appears to be the reason your space is not matching up. Is this the only server that accesses that LUN? If you have others, can you run the same command on the other servers? Do you have extents or is it a single LUN?

It should print out as below.

-KjB

VMFS-3.31 file system spanning 1 partitions.

File system label (if any): Local-ilabblade12-5

Mode: public

Capacity 54760833024 (52224 file blocks * 1048576), 3689938944 (3519 blocks) avail

UUID: 47c82286-5f64fbf4-da0b-00145eb33172

Partitions spanned (on "lvm"):

vmhba0:0:0:6

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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rboteler
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks KJB that was a good idea,

I have just run vmkfstools -p on our other esx host, and got the following:

There are no extents, just a single lun.

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kjb007
Immortal
Immortal

Ok, so both outputs match, 273 GB.

Do you have a lot of snapshots? That may be the additional space.

Can you also run du -sh /vmfs/volumes/VMFS-SYSTEM/* |awk 'BEGIN{i=0} {i=i+$1; print $1" " $2} END{print "Total is " i"G"}'

This may or may not match the total, but it includes snapshots, which may not show up correctly in the vmkfstools output.

-KjB

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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