Automatic Space Reclaim with Thin Disks in vSphere with NFS | NetApp | Page 1

marble bough Jan 24, 2024, 2:37 AM

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Hi Team..

We are not using VSC, and we are mounting volumes on vSphere using NFSv4.

Even when we delete data in the NFS Datastore, it seems that the volume usage does not decrease, and the Datastore usage does not decrease either.

How should we address this issue?

vivid pike Jan 24, 2024, 3:33 AM

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this has been explained before. When you delete data in a VM, that is on the "guest" filesystem. If using windows, that underlying guest filesystem is NTFS. Look at how it actually works. When you "delete" a file, you do not really delete anything. If I recall, the OS renames the file (replaces the first character) and then you no longer see it. It is still there. That is how the "undelete" programs typically work. They find those files and mark to recover. If you really want to "recover" the space, you need to get any utility that actually "zeros" out the unused space.

maiden sapphire Jan 24, 2024, 8:24 AM

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either that, or snapshots keep the vmdk files locked. Anyways, using NFSv4 for ESX datastores is a very bad idea, you almost certainly will have trouble with that during failover, ONTAP updates, etc.

marble bough Jan 24, 2024, 8:42 AM

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Thanks!!!

humble stirrup Jan 24, 2024, 7:34 PM

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It's also possible VAAI may not support zeroing on NFSv4 depending on your version of VMware software.

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I think support for NFSv4.x has gotten better but it's still new and not very well proven IMO. Why? You're not getting any advantage over NFSv3.

#Automatic Space Reclaim with Thin Disks in vSphere with NFS