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dgoldsmith
Contributor
Contributor

vCenter Server is Under Reporting Disk Usage for a VM

We are running vCenter Server 5.5.x and vSphere ESXi 5.5.x.  On the vCenter Server, looking at the VM, it has two virtual disks - one is 25GB and one is 250GB. The "Provisioned" line is 276.11 GB which makes sense given the other files that make up the VM.  The "Used Storage" line is 11.01 GB.

When I connect to that VM (Linux server), I see that it is using about 3GB from the boot disk (25GB) and its using 16GB on one partition that is on the data disk (250GB) for a total use of about 19GB.

The VMDKs are thin and the underlying LUN from the SAN array is thin also.

From vCenter's perspective, where is my missing 8GB of disk usage?

Thanks,

Dave

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Anjani_Kumar
Commander
Commander

Hello Smith,

As you told in your comment its a Linux vm. which acquired a disk space of "swap" partition with in it.which auto assigned while you create a default installation of it. and this can be the know "thief" which is stealing your 8 GIG of Disk space.

You can make sure it via running  "df -h" command to see what is the Swap partition space is using.


All the best,

Please consider marking this answer "correct" or "helpful" if you found it useful.

Anjani Kumar

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Please consider marking this answer "correct" or "helpful" if you found it useful. Anjani Kumar | VMware vExpert 2014-2015-2016 | Infrastructure Specialist Twitter : @anjaniyadav85 Website : http://www.Vmwareminds.com
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dgoldsmith
Contributor
Contributor

Ok, there is a 1GB swap partition, but that actually increases the discrepancy rather than shrinks it.  That means that potentially the guest OS is using 20GB rather than 19GB and vCenter is still reporting 11GB.

df -h won't show swap as its not a mounted filesystem.  Looking at /etc/fstab file will show if some partition should be being used for swap and the 'free' command will show the aggregate size of any swap partitions that have been activated.

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