Removing Storage Extents

[dcaperton]

I have a 1.9TB lun on an emc device, and I added an extent to a 700GB lun on a totally different iSCSI storage device (promise). I have since removed the 700GB lun from the storage adapter, however the datastore still shows a Capacity of 2.6TB. I was under the impression once I removed the target from the storage adapter the extent would automatically be removed and the datastore would show the correct size. Does anyone have any ideas why I still show a 2.6TB datastore?

-danny

[Texiwill · Accepted solution]

Hello,

The only way to remove an extent is to remove the entire VMFS. This is the unfortunate side effect of using extents.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[weinstein5]

To add to what Ed has said - when you do this it destroys all data -

[TomHowarth]

Once an extent is applied to a VMFS partition the only why to get rid of it completely is to reformate the entire partition. the issue you have now is that you have a 1.9TB LUN that reports to ESX as 2.6TB. if you do not rigourously monitor space, you will be in a whole world of pain soon as ESX thinks it has at least 700GB's more that it in reality has.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[dcaperton]

Thanks guys,

I was hoping for a better answer but all is not lost. I can svmotion these guests over to a different lun and reformat. It'll just be a time consuming process. Thanks for the help.

Danny