Datastore LUN reclaim

[aahmed28]

Hi,

I am learning vmware and i have setup a vmware lab on workstation with trial version of 6.7.

I have installed esxi 6.7 on workstation 12 running on windows 7 desktop.

I am using windows server 2008 R2 to provide iSCSI luns to esxi server on vmware workstation. I have created lun of 10 GB on iscsi server and attached as separate dis to vm(server 2008 R2) on esxi server . I have found that after deleting data from vm it still showing lun size almost full. I checked inside the vm and found 97% free space in disk management. However on data store it still showing 10 percent free.I have checked in datastore configuration Automatic Space Reclamation is enabled. 

Please let me know how to reclaim the space from datastore.

1. Vmware workstation running on windows 7

2. One DC and one iSCSI server running on workstation along with two ESXi host.

3. Both esxi servers are in cluster.

4. Datastore version is VMFS 6.

5. vcenter appliance is running on esxi-1.

[ThompsG]

Hi aahmed28 and welcome to the community,

The crawler mechanism to free up dead space runs every 12 hours automatically. Is it possible that you haven't allowed this period of time to lapse yet?

Kind regards.

[StephenMoll]

Might it be this? Tip of the Day: Unmap and iSCSI – Tip of the Day

[aahmed28]

Hello ThompsG,

I was thinking initially about this and i checked the lun size next day but still same.

Since this lab is a kind of nested environment where esxi running on vmware workstaion and iscsi luns coming from virtual server 2008 r2. I thought might be the system doesn't support hardware acceleration. then i ran the following esxcli command to check the vaai status.

esxcli storage core device vaai status command. I get the below result.

ATS Status: unsupported

Clone Status: unsupported

Zero Status: unsupported

Delete Status: unsupported

However when i did the storage migration of the affected HDD. The size of the lun reduced as expected. Not sure why the vmdk file is showing 3 GB size even the drive when looking inside the OS showing 97% free.