VMFS Extents and Missing Space

[PhilEddies]

Hi,

We are running 5 VMWare ESX 3.5 Hosts connected to at Hitachi SAN via fibre.

Our VMWare Hosts all have 7 248Gb Luns presented to them which have been joined together using extents to form a 1.7TB VMFS

The VI Client says of this 1.7TB we have 430Gb free so we have used 1.3TB. However this is wrong I have totalled up the size of every file on the VMFS (by browsing datastore) and we have used 800Gb.

So where could our missing 500Gb be?

Any ideas \ suggestions \ recommendations etc?

Thanks

Phil

[PhilEddies]

I am starting to see extents don't seem to be the way to go, I thought it would be better for performance and managment as I would have a single VMFS but still be able to set my 7 luns to go down diffent paths to the SAN

I still would like a single VMFS so does the following seem any good?

On my SAN I have 14x 146Gb disks, a total of around 2TB.

I have 5 Hosts, each Host has four paths to the SAN (fibre) so create a single 2Tb LUN on the SAN, present this to all of the Hosts and set my multipathing so the LUN on Host1 uses Path1 and the LUN on Host2 uses Path2 etc

[dmaster]

sounds okay..

what you also can do is using load balancing mechanism for your storage paths..

sort of round robin mechanism but it's still experimental in ESX 3.5.

[PhilEddies]

Thanks dmaster, I will go away and do that.

I have given you the points. Thanks