Planet vSphere-land

In my previous two articles, I showed you how to create your own SE Sparse disks as well as creating new virtual machine Linked Clones leveraging the new SE Sparse disk format. If you recall earlier, one of the features of the SE Sparse disk format is to provide the ability to reclaim unused blocks within the guestOS which is a two step process: wipe and shrink.Here is a screenshot that describe...

As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Detailed at VMworld but not released as of this writing, vSphere 5.1 is lauded for eliminating the “vTax” and bringing features like replication, a revised backup application, and shared-nothing vMotion. Unlike version 5, which included many new technical storage...

There’s been a lot of confusion lately surrounding the UNMAP command which is used to reclaim deleted space on thin provisioning that is done at the storage array level. The source of the confusion is VMware’s support for it which has changed since the original introduction of the feature in vSphere 5.0. As a result I wanted to try and sum up everything around it to clear up any m...

Guest Reclaim to recover lost space on thin provisionned disks. After the announce few days ago I was wondering on how to possibly use this tool, since there are some limitations. Most likely, as said in the Guest Reclaim ReadMe (pdf) file, the tool will take part in future updates to VMware hypervisor.  For now this tool [...]The post Recover lost space from thin provisioned disks by using G...

VMware released vSphere 5.0 Update 1 last week, which mainly included bug fixes but it also brought back one very cool feature that was initially introduced with the release of vSphere 5.0 called Thin Provisioning UNMAP primitive for an ESXi host. You can read more about the details in this article by my colleague Cormac Hogan.As you can see from From Cormac's article, the process of reclaiming ...

I just saw an interesting article on Jason Boche's blog about VMware's recall of the new VAAI UNMAP primitive for vSphere 5. VMware released a new KB article KB2007427 documenting the details along with a recommendation to disable the VAAI UNMAP primitive for now (a patch will be released in the future to automatically disable this until the issue is resolved).One thing that caught my in the VMw...

With vSphere 5.0 a brand new primitive has been introduced which is called Dead Space Reclamation as part of the overall thin provisioning primitive. Dead Space Reclamation is also sometimes referred to as unmap and it enables you to reclaim blocks of thin-provisioned LUNs by telling the array that specific blocks are obsolete, and yes that command used is the SCSI “unmap” command. N...