![vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space](https://i.stack.imgur.com/48BmD.jpg)
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Vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space free#
The final step is to scan the VMDK disk for blocks made up of all zeros, and then ‘hole punch’ those blocks to be used as free space again in the VMFS filesystem. I may run through this process in a future post. In Linux, the dd tool can be used in a similar manner. Obviously, SDelete is a windows-only tool. As expected, from the guest’s perspective, nothing appeared to change. The whole process took only 5 minutes or so and was very uneventful. Using the tool is quite simple – just run SDelete (or SDelete64 for 64-bit installs) with the -z option against the drive letter in question. Obviously we don’t want to write new data over top of the deleted data, so thankfully the tool also has a ‘-z’ option to write zeros over these blocks instead. The tool’s primary purpose is to securely delete files by writing randomized data over released blocks to prevent deleted data from being recovered.
Vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space download#
SDelete is a free tool made by Sysinternals and available for download from the Microsoft site here.
Vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space windows#
There are likely several different ways that this can be done, but I used the SDelete method recommended for Windows machines in VMware KB 2004155. I’d recommend running a chkdsk or fsck before proceeding. File system repair tools may need data in these blocks if there are inconsistencies detected.
Vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space iso#
In the example of my Windows jump box, the deletion of OVA and ISO files simply instructed the underlying NTFS filesystem to make those blocks available to be overwritten. There are a few reasons for this, but the important thing to remember is that when space is freed in the guest operating system, it doesn’t mean that those blocks no longer contain data. They don’t shrink on their own to release freed disk space. Unfortunately, as you can see, thin VMDKs only expand.
![vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space](https://s1.manualzz.com/store/data/010506110_1-a0606fc804f79b7beb953634c0e3e4fd-360x466.png)
Thin provisioned disks are designed to expand and consume more disk space as the virtual machine requires. Getting that Space Back!Īlthough this certainly isn’t a new topic, and has been covered elsewhere, I wanted to document my own experience with this process and provide some extra context in case it may be helpful. Using the ‘du’ command – for disk usage – we can see the flat file containing the data is still consuming over 43GB of space: du -h *flat*.vmdk rw- 1 root root 8.5K Feb 16 15:26 jump.nvram
![vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space vmware esxi 5 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space](https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/eed104ca38347caf0fd5a098cb5dc0fe54da51ee/5-Table1-1.png)
rw- 1 root root 50.0G Feb 16 17:55 jump-flat.vmdk rw- 1 root root 3.1M Feb 12 21:50 jump-ctk.vmdk