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I have a small problem here understanding why is the Space Reported between EMC and vmWare off by so much.

EMC says Available Size for both pools ca. 700GB .

VMWare says for both DataStores I have 1500GB and 1600GB Free Space.

All my Hosts use Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroed .

Is this normal ? I know that the Data on the EMC is stored differently than on the VMWare ... but who is holding the Space Back ? Is the EMC still reserving that much space even if its free?

Can this be somehow released somehow?

Thank you

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    Why are you using a hypervisor that's been EOL for 2.5 years? Mar 14, 2021 at 8:03

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Quote from https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-vSphere-Discussions/storage-usage-not-correct/td-p/463584

Virtual disks in vSphere are provided as files at the storage layer and the file which hold the data is a binary file. This binary file do not change its size at will. Or, more exactly, these binary files can only grow (also with thin provisioned disks).

If you want to reduce the size of virtual disks, you would have to reorganize the entire blocks within this binary file. That only happens with a Storage vMotion since much effort is involved in this operation.

An example, to illustrate this behavior:

You create a 100 GB thin provisioned disk and attach it to a VM. Then you copy 50 GB of data to that disk. In the operating system and vSphere you will now see a disk usage of 50 GB. Then you delete 25 GB. In the OS you now only see an used capacity of 25 GB. In vSphere, however, you see an used capacity of 50 GB since the underlying binary file is still 50 GB large.

So, if you migrate the VM to another datastore, the size should match the size displayed in the OS again. At least, until it drifts apart again. --- Regards, Sebastian VCP6.5-DCV // VCP7-CMA // vSAN 2017 Specialist Please mark this answer as 'helpful' or 'correct' if you think your question has been answered correctly.

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