Comments on: VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space

By: Mohamed

Mohamed — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:14:34 +0000

Hi All,

For reclaiming thin provisioning space you no need to use that SDELELTE utility. Simply you can migrate the Guest VM to a differenct datastore.

**********Wishing you all the best**************

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:40:52 +0000

For version 4.1, we ran into the issue where space was not recovered. This seems to be the case when the source and target datastores have the same block size. If they have different block sizes, the vmotion process reclaims the space that was zeroed out by sdelete.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:32:04 +0000

SSH(or use ALT+F1 at the console then type unsupported) into your host containing the disk you want to shrink.

Cd to /vmfs/volumes/(YourDatastoreName)/(YourVMsName).

Locate your the name of the vmdk you want to shrink.

Then the command is vmkfstools -i (YourDisk).vmdk -d thin (NewDiskName).vmdk

Edit settings in your VM and attach the new disk you just made and remove the original(but don’t delete it)

After seeing that it boots. Then you are free to delete the original.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:03:24 +0000

Actually, I found that space was reclaimed ONLY when I storage vMotioned to a datastore of a DIFFERENT blocksize..!

By: fred

fred — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:26:52 +0000

I have to remark an important point : Storage Vmotion will work correctly only if the size block between the both datastores are the same …

By: Aamir

Aamir — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:07:56 +0000

Hi,
How Can i use Dell Power Vault 114t Tape Drive scsi, with ESX 4.0?
Shall i connect it to any ESX server?
How multiple VMs located on other Vcenter server can use this tape drive?

Regards & Thanks,
Aamir

By: DonChamp

DonChamp — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:08:29 +0000

The only thing I found working every time is
1 image out,
2 make new thin disk
3 image back

sucks btw

if it’s data Partition copy data to new thin drive from
1 d: til e:
2 change drives letters

another good reason to have OS and data on separate partitions.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:59:43 +0000

Seems to be fixed in vSphere5. I use vOptimizer Pro to do alignments and resize operations. If you run resize with total disk size quota set to size of Windows partition it will zero out un-used space and space will be reclaimed by VMFS.

This did not work with ESX 4.x only was I was able to get space reclaimed was to run SDELETE -c –z and then storage vMotion to NFS datastore.

By: Tarek

Tarek — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 04:27:37 +0000

Hi All,
Thank you Eiad for the post.
we have ESX 4.1 update 1 and i used the V-locity from diskeeper.com insted of the sdelete , you can get a free 30 day version from thier website.
It totaly did the sdelete job in a very easy and secure way.
i have tested that on one vm so far, and i am working right now on the others .

Regards

By: Thomas Fuk

Thomas Fuk — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:40:25 +0000

As Julian Field said above. Unfortunately, it does not work with vSphere 4.1 (tested on ESXi 4.1 update 1). Does someone find a solution for free unused space on thin disk or it´s now impossible?
Thanks, TF