Thin provisoning has issues. I have a Equallogic with thin provisioning enabled but the Equallogic space being used is a lot more than what ESX reports back in vcentre of du -h. The volume...
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Thin provisoning has issues. I have a Equallogic with thin provisioning enabled but the Equallogic space being used is a lot more than what ESX reports back in vcentre of du -h. The volume on the Equallogic keeps growing until it goes past its warnings. This is from the Equallogic support mentions. A thin-provisioned volume grows automatically due to application data writes. If later the application frees up space, the space is free in the file system but is not returned to the free space in the PS Series pool. The only way to reduce the physical allocation is to create a new volume, copy the application data from the old volume to the new, and then delete the old volume. When the volume goes to 100% it will go offline. The vmfs file system will not use the free space so once it is written to you can say goodbye to the space. This feature is hyped as a good idea by Equallogic but VMWare warns of these issues. Equallogics solution is The only way to reduce the physical allocation in the SAN is to create a new volume, copy the application data from the old volume to the new, and then delete the old volume. This is not a solution!!!!!!