Space reclaim after Data Deduplication process

[pankajrudrawar]

Hello,

I am using Netapp filer which has the capability names as "Data Deduplication" and currently I run these process on volumes which hosts VM's on these ESX server.

After runnning the Data Dedup process, volumes are reclaiming the space but I am not able to see any change on Vmware ESX server side.

Can anyone suggest me, how to reclaim or get the real time space figures from ESX server?

Regards,

Pankaj Rudrawar

[weinstein5]

Have you tried rescanning the drives if they are SAN based? Also have you confirmed with NetApp that their Dedupe technology will work with VMware - in principle it should but just to be safe?

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[mcowger]

You wont see any changes - the storage does not inform the host of the space savings from dedup technologies.

--Matt

[ablej]

Are you using NFS or iSCSI/FC? If using iSCSI/FC you will only see space savings at the volume level, since iSCSI/FC uses VMFS. If using NFS you should see the space savings at the LUN level.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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[admin]

You have reclaimed space on the underlying WAFL filesystem but whether its is usable space inside the datastore depends on the protocol used.

For iscsi or FC the ESX host owns the filesystem (VMFS) and so the space savings will only be available to the parent volume and not in the LUN or datastore. This space can be used for additional NetApp snapshots etc.

Only NFS will allow the reclaimed space to be realized and actually used within the datastore. This is because the filer owns the filesystem. Realizing this space can be done by selecting the datastore and choosing Refresh.

[aldikan]

ablej and virtek are correct,

with NFS we see space savings on the LUN level,

Alex

[sstewart077]

My 2 cents....

virtek has the only complete accurate answer, the statement 'with NFS we see space savings on the LUN level' should be looked at since you won't publich LUN's to vmware through NFS. You may be referring to a datastore in this case.