Storage difference shown in vSphere vs Storage

[gabriel_1010]

Hello,

Why is the storage capacity of my storage displayed in vSphere different from what it actually has?

in vSphere is displayed 48.84TB

on my DELL ME5 storage it has 53.6 TB

[NateNateNAte]

ESXi reserves a percentage of the resource storage for things like vMotion, swap files, etc. It's a percentage versus a fixed amount since environments come in all kinds of (storage) shapes and sizes.  If you have vSAN that also takes some overhead. 

All hypervisors (and most storage arrays) do the same thing.  Heck, even a Windows OS partitions off a portion of storage for recovery.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Storage an HDD/SSD vendors (likely the marketing) like to make their systems look "better".
Therefore they usually show size values in TB (Base 10), rather than TiB (Base 2).

VMware on the other side shows the real technical size (Base 2), thus the difference.

Dell PowerVault/ME systems offer an option to select how the sizes should be displayed. Other than the older ME4, the new ME5 does not offer this user setting in the GUI, but only from the CLI (see https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/powervault-me5024/me5_series_cli/set-user?guid=guid-80059...).

André

[gabriel_1010]

thanks for your helps