Space used on LUN in VMWare

[paulow1978]

Dear Starwind Team,

I have a quickk question about SAN luns in a vmware vsphere environment. The reason I ask is because I have an issue with my Dell Equallogic with a particular issue and wondered if the same applies to Starwind.

Basically it all centres around free/used space on a VMFS volume. If I create a 1TB lun full provisioned on the Starwind SAN and serve it up to VMWare and format it, then create a 500GB thick provisioned VM and install windows/write some data then Starwind should mark those block as being used and are dirty. If i then delete the vm in vmware should the free space go back to 0GB in Starwind?. There are no graphs in the console to show used space so I am assuming so. On the Dell equallogics the SAN still shows the blocks as dirty. I don't yet know if this is an issue or it means I am going to have to svmotion my vm's on my equallogic to a new LUN then delete the original lun and recreate them.

thanks,

Paul

[Max (staff)]

I think all thin provisioned disks, regardless of vendor, will behave this way/
A thin provisioned disk is not aware of any delete operations on the final VMFS partition, so it won't shrink if files are deleted on the client side.