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Albert WidjajaFlag for Australia

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Reclaim free space on thin VMFS 5 data store safely with no downtime ?

Is there any command or way how to reclaim the free disk space from a VMFS5 data store ?

Ideally with no downtime to the VM running on the datastore or can be safely done during the business hours.

Note: my underlying Storage is PureStorage SSD All Flash Array.
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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ok, what's the new reclaim tool software name and how to use it ?
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Thanks guys,

So how to calculate the percentage of the free space ?

User generated image
in the screenshot above, I have 285 GB Free from the 2 TB VMFS datastore total space.

Shall I do 285/2000 * 100% = 14.25%
so therefore the command will be:

vmkfstools -y 14.25

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or do i have to type if different number with some overhead ?
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I think I would be a little cautious, and use 10%.
I'm using ESXi 5.1 Update 1
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hi Jim,

Do you mean like vmkfstools -y 10

what about if the value is too large and it causes all of the VM in the datastore stopping or crashed ? would that scenario be possible to happens if I set the value to high ?

@Andrew: I'll try to run the command vmkfstools -y 10 several times and hopefully I can see the free space usable increased slowly but sure.
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Jim_Nim

A reason to consider an upgrade to ESX 5.5: reclaiming deleted blocks on a thin volume doesn't use a single large "balloon" file, but rather several (one after the other) of a specified block size. This essentially eliminates the concern of filling up a datastore during the process, and is much safer to perform during production.
Cool, nice to hear that feature is vailable. but i hate the Web console :-|

but at the moment I guess I'll stay withESXi 5.1 Update 2 and then 3 in the next few months ahead.