SDRS and thin provisioning

[JLogan2016]

I'm working with a company that just completed a 6.5 upgrade. As part of the migration they have converted all VMs from Thick Eager Zeroed to Thin. There is concern using SDRS on the datastore clusters now, as it seems to make decisions on placement based on utilized space not provisioned space. What they would like to do is keep each datastore to no more than 120% (e.g. 7.2TB on 6 TB datastore) provisioned. I have been looking under Advanced settings, hoping there might be a configuration parameter I can set, but thus far have not come upon anything. Just curious if there is any way to set this, or what others are doing with thin provisioning. I can do it through PowerCLI, checking the provisioned percentage of each datastore and then moving VMs accordingly, but would hate to have to resort to this method.

[GayathriS]

No  I dont think there is a setting or option from vcenter or esxi to achieve this or set this thresh hold which is beyond the datastore size.

Please consider marking this answer as "correct" or "helpful" if you think your questions have been answered.

regards

Gayathri

[lucasbernadsky]

You can make some cool alarms with vROps in that case. It will not prevent SDRS to place the VM but at least, you will receive a notification.

Also, I strongly recommend to upgrade the VM HW version of all VMs supported to 13, and present new datastores to VMFS6 (I had some issues upgrading from VMFS5 to 6, so if you can present new LUNs it would be great).

With VMFS6 you have the automatic unmap feature that is great for Thin Provisioning VMs.

https://blog.purestorage.com/monitoring-automatic-vmfs-6-unmap-in-esxi/

[JLogan2016]

Thanks, lucasbernadsky, for the suggestions. I am definitely using vROPS to alert me, and will have to simply run a script to even the datastores out I guess. Unfortunately, one of the (many) items out of my control is the HW version. Management decided, out of fear of "what might happen", to migrate the VMs (current HW version 7 through 10) to the new environment but not actually upgrade the HW. No amount of discussion on my part could convince them otherwise; the best I got was "We'll look at it down the road". So many of the additional features that would be helpful are left out of my reach for the time being.