Rasmus Haslund

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EqualLogic reclaim space from VMware ESXi datastore

2013-05-16 by Rasmus Haslund 2 Comments

Today I visited a customer to perform a health check. Their system consisted of VMware ESXi hosts running on EqualLogic SAN storage.

The volumes on the EqualLogic were thin provisioned and one of them were running ALMOST full plus a good way beyond the warning limit.
equallogic_thin_reclaim_before
As you can see the usage is exceeding the warning limit a lot. Unreserved space is only 12 GB.

 

Warning: If your thin provisioned volume usage exceeds the warning limit write IOPS drops to 10%

 

From the vSphere client I could see 102,64 GB free space:
equallogic_thin_reclaim_datastore_usage

This means we should be able to reclaim up to the 102,64 GB free space from the EqualLogic volume.

Luckily they had already previously upgraded their EqualLogic firmware to 6.0.1 so we could use the unmap feature.

The process is as follows:
1. Enable SSH on one of your hosts connected to the EqualLogic
2. Connect to the host using SSH
3. Issue command: cd /vmfs/volumes/NAME-OF-DATASTORE
4. Issue command: vmkfstools -y 60
5. Check that the command does not fail. If it fails run it with a lower number – fx: vmkfstools -y 10
6. You might have to run the command multiple times to reclaim all available space
7. Logout from host and disable SSH on the host

After running the reclaim command a few times I checked the EqualLogic group manager for the results:
equallogic_thin_reclaim_after

As you can see the unreserved space now is 109,26 GB. Good results!

 

Please leave a comment if this helped you 🙂

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Filed Under: EqualLogic, Fix IT Tagged With: equallogic, ESXi, reclaim, thin, VMware

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Divmans Patel
9 years ago

Thats only 60% reclaiming of the space. So -y % is determining how much disk space you can recover out of the deleted blocks on Thiv Prov Array.

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Brian Killigrew
8 years ago

This is only relevant to thin volumes correct? To reclaim space on a thick volume, you would have to delete it and re-create it right?

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