Space reclamation with Thin Provisioned VMDK on NetApp Filer (NFS) / VAAI UNMAP

[utcdsi]

Hello,

We have a lot of VMs with thin-provisioned VMDKs on NFS datastores (NetApp cluster-mode filer) and we would like to do some space reclamation as the VMDKs tend to grow to the maximum size even if the filesystems are not full.

We do not want to do things like filling the free space with 0 / SVMotion as this is not very practical.

I have read some blog articles describing VAAI UNMAP, but it seems to be limited to VMFS volumes, is it the case or is it also working with NFS datastores ? If this is supported, what are the prerequisites ?

I have also read about SE sparse VMDKs which may help, but this format seems to be supported for VMware View VMs. The Web client does not let you create directly SE sparse disks, but it is doable through the API for "standard" VMs.

Can we use SE sparse for standard VMs or is it totally unsupported ? What are the drawbacks of this format compared to the traditional thick/thin formats ?

Environment: VMware vSphere 6.5 (Enterprise).

Thanks in advance!

[depping]

I believe the NetApp vSphere Plugin actually has an option for that: https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1392339/html/GUID-2C1BCD71-9A8A-423E-9C37-230CB9F60394.html Note that there's a power-off involved it seems. **I have never personally tested this, and cannot guarantee it works or is safe to use **