Managing Datastores

[AndyTipton]

Can anyone point me to a whitepaper etc on best practices for managing datastores?

I've never really understood how to best maintain each VM so they don't swallow up disk space in the store, eg what each of the files does, which logs, delta's etc can be deleted to reclaim space.

I've got a couple of vm's that have had issues with snapshots and have created redo logs and delta files well beyond the allocated limits. I just want to be sure it's safe to cleanup some of these files.

Any help would be appreciated.

Andy.

[RParker]

Well I am not sure if there are any datastore forums or strategies, the best tool I found for this purpose is du -h. This will list the directory / files and show the size in easy to read format, and you can see how big the folders are, and easily see the name.

Run this command while viewing /vmfs/volumes/

Then for cleanup in each VM, I would advise that you keep the VM running while you prune the directories, this is to ensure that while the VM is keeping the files open, you don't accidentally delete needed files.

Other than that, the VMFS is like cleaning up a file server, or any other data drive, you pretty much have to keep up with it on a monthly basis.