performance data store

[Uraken007]

Hello all,

new to VMware and the community, i have recently taken over a vSphere environment and noticed that i have inherited a datastore that has a name performance volume. it has no vms on it and I cannot see anything different from any of the other data stores.

Now I am fairly certain the guru that set it up would have done it for a reason but I cannot see it. Can anybody point me the right direction to see how it differs and how it should be being used.

thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice.

best wishes.

[BivasM]

select the datastore , go to configure >> device backing

That should tell you the type of disks that are used to build that datastore (whether SAN/ Local disks) 

with the datastore selected select the "hosts" tab

That should tell which hosts it is exposed to

with the datastore selected select the "files" tab

this allows you to see if there are other types of files in that datastore (even if there are no vm's on it). Keep in mind that vsphere replication does not show replicated site vm's .

how much space has been consumed? 

You can make your decision with all of these infos combined. 

[memaad]

Login to ESXI host , using SSH/putty , then cd /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName  , then list all files, using command  ls -ltrh

IF you dont see anything listed. Then place datastore in maintenance mode if you dont want to use it

[Uraken007]

Hi @BivasM this is the thing it is being used by nothing( no files or vms), although mounted by all my hosts. It has been created using SAN disks the same as all the other datastores. I didn't know if a data store could be used as some kind of virtual RAM or similar and i missed a hidden setting somewhere but if not it appears i can rename it and use it as a normal datastore. thanks for your help.

[Uraken007]

Hi @memaad yeah done that no files other than vmware created defaults so I guess the name is misleading and it is not a performance data store at all and i can safely rename and reuse.

thanks again

[Uraken007 · Accepted solution]

Ok so it turns out the performace is managed at the SAN level and this datastore was on a volume that had its Tier affinity set to performance, so vms that live here get the best performance i/o on the SAN, nothing to do with any settings on the Vmware side of things.