Hello, I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.
I' am a self-funded student having a home lab as part of my final year project.
- ESXi : 7.0 Update 2 (Dell Customised ISO - DEL-ESXi-702_17630552-A00 (Dell Inc.))
- vCenter: 7.0.2
I have 4 SSDs for storage:
- ESXi runs on an NVMe drive while
- 3 SATA SSDs host OS + Data.
- I load OS from a single drive, and data is partitioned between the remaining SSDs (2).
There are two identical VMs (not clones, and they have the same configurations, including storage) but running the same application (Elastic Stack), and it is mirror mode.
Both VMs have almost identical disk usage when checked from inside the VM.
However, when I checked in VMWare, I can see VM-1 using 200 GB more on the attached storage and project has 20 GB of logs per day. For a self-funded student this means a lot (SSDs are expensive in India).
What is the best way to recover this space? I have checked space reclamation settings, and it is at the default of 100 Mbps. There are no snapshots for the VMs.
EDIT 1:
I have followed https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-5E1396BE-6EA8-4A6B-A458-FC9718E2C55B.html and https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-5E1396BE-6EA8-4A6B-A458-FC9718E2C55B.html to reclaim space.
I tailed the hostd.log and can see blocks being freed up as part of the request (total request took 3 minutes to finish). In the end no change in the free disk space
Documentation here states "To verify whether the unmap process has finished, search for unmap in the vmkernel.log file". When I searched on my instances, I cannot find this. However hostd.log clearly shows blocks being deleted.
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc/GUID-62587830-C92F-409E-9B35-B63CC4D4A2DC.html