Category: UNMAP

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What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part IV: In-Guest UNMAP CBT Support

This is the fourth in my series of what’s new in ESXi 6.5 storage. Here are the previous posts:

What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part I: UNMAP

What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part II: Resignaturing

What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part III: Thin hot extend

Here is another post for vSphere 6.5 UNMAP! So many improvements and this is a big one for many users. Certainly makes me happy. Previously, in vSphere 6.0.x, when in-guest space reclamation was introduced, the enabling of change block tracking for a given virtual disk blocked the guest OS from being able to issue UNMAP to that disk and therefore prevented it from leveraging the goodness it provides. Rumor has it that this undesirable behavior continued in vSphere 6.5…

leecorso

Continue reading “What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part IV: In-Guest UNMAP CBT Support”

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VMFS UNMAP switches block count

A recent question I got about my UNMAP PowerCLI script was it says it was using a certain block count but when I looked at the log it was using 200. Why?

Well I blogged before about why a given UNMAP process might revert to the default block count of 200 here. Essentially, if you indicate a block count larger than 1% of the free space of the VMFS ESXi will revert it to 200. Or if the VMFS is more than 75% full it will always override the block count back down to 200. Continue reading “VMFS UNMAP switches block count”

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Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator

Let me start out with saying I’m embarrassed I have only been using vRO for 8 months or so. It is AWESOME.

The FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator has been updated to include two new objects:

  1. Auto-expand datastore policy template
  2. Workflow to run UNMAP on a datastore

The creation of the first part is explained in this post. But if you are using the FlashArray it is all built into the package, so you have to do very little work. I’ll explain in a bit.

The UNMAP workflow is generic–it can be used with any VMFS datastore that supports UNMAP. So it is included in the workflow package and it is also standalone for those of you who don’t have a FlashArray. You can get the standalone here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/vmfsunmap.workflow

Continue reading “Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator”

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ZeroedThick or EagerZeroedThick? That is the question.

Having a best practices conversation the other day with a customer and the usual topic came up about any recommendations when it comes to virtual disk type. We had the usual conversation thin or thick, the ins and outs of those two. In the end it doesn’t matter too much, especially with some recent improvements in ESXi 6.0. The further question came up, well what about between zeroedthick and eagerzeroedthick? My initial reaction was that it doesn’t matter for the most part. But we had just had a conversation about Space Reclamation (UNMAP) and I realized, actually, I did have a big preference and it was EZT. Let me explain why.

Continue reading “ZeroedThick or EagerZeroedThick? That is the question.”

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FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions

I have officially decided to “retire” my UNMAP script that uses direct REST calls to find before and after capacity changes for given volumes. I am only updating the one that uses the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK from this point on–using this is much more robust, not tied to direct API versions and greatly simplifies managing the data in the script.clip_image006

I have also created a second version for use in the VMware Fling called PowerActions. This allows the script to be executed from the vSphere Web Client.

Continue reading “FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions”

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UNMAP Block Count Behavior Change in ESXi 5.5 P3+

I recently was doing some troubleshooting for a customer that was using my UNMAP PowerCLI script and discovered a change in ESXi 5.5+ UNMAP. The issue was that the script was taking quite a while to complete. After some logic optimizations and increasing timeouts the script was sped up a bit and less timeout errors occurred, but a bunch of the UNMAP operations were still taking a lot longer than expected. Eventually we threw our hands up and said it was good enough. A bit more recently, I was testing a 3rd party UNMAP tool and ran into similar behavior so I dug into it a bit more and found some semi-unexpected changes in how UNMAP works, specifically the behavior when leveraging non-default block iteration counts. Continue reading “UNMAP Block Count Behavior Change in ESXi 5.5 P3+”

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Required ESXi permissions for UNMAP through PowerCLI

I received a question recently on another UNMAP post what are the minimum permissions required to run UNMAP with PowerCLI and finally got around to looking into it. Turns out it is very straight forward. If you run it with a read-only account–it will fail. Since it is creating a file and making changes some configuration authority is required. Running as read only will look like this:

failedunmap

Continue reading “Required ESXi permissions for UNMAP through PowerCLI”