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  • 1.  Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 07:10 PM

    Hello,

    I've been searching through this forum since there's barely any information out there on the net and 3par support doesn't seem to be of much help.

    I have a TPVV (thin provisioned virtual volume) of 1 TB for some VM's..  We recently got a notification indicating it was nearing capacity.  I went through most of the VM's (mostly Windows), ran Sdelete, converted any that were configured with thick-volumes into thin.  I did this by moving to local storage and then back to the TPVV.  According to vSphere, the amount of used space is under 60%, yet the 3Par is still claiming to be near capacity.

    When I went to the 3Par CLI, I ran the command:

    compactcpg -dr [CPGNAME]

    The CPG is basically the virtual volume.  We allocated 1 TB to the CPG and created one TPVV of 1TB.  The dry run indicates that the SA and SD disks would not reclaim any space.  In looking at the logical disks, I see that most of them have the space taken up.

    I've gone through the documents, the net (basically this forum) and 3par support, but I haven't found my answer yet.  Hoping one of you experts know!



  • 2.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 07:11 PM

    Forgot to mention that I've also looked into the command 'freespace' for virtual volumes, but there's no dry run option so I didn't want to run it.



  • 3.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 07:23 PM

    Do you have zero detection enabled on your virtual volumes?  If not, running the sdelete wont do anything.



  • 4.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 07:39 PM

    The unit is a E200 and I'm running v 3.0.0.45.  I can't seem to find that setting on the virtual volume.  Is zero-detection a newer feature than the system I'm currently on?

    If we don't have zero-detection, is there anything we can do to "free up" the space?  Can I create a new TPVV, attach it to the ESX hosts and then migrate the datastores to the new VV?



  • 5.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 07:57 PM

    The older E-series dont have this ability.

    The only way to free up space would be to create new TPVVs (usually best to do this in a new CPG), mask them to your hosts, svmotion to the new volumes, delete the old volumes and then do a compactcpg (or just delete the CPG if its empty).



  • 6.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jul 28, 2011 08:08 PM

    Thanks - I just came across a 3par white paper that stated this :/

    Our licensing agreement is up this fall.  Hopefully, I can convince the boss to upgrade to a F or T class :smileygrin:



  • 7.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jan 10, 2012 03:52 AM

    I have a similar problem on a 3PAR T400.

    I have zero detect, have run sdelete -z on my Windows VM and compactCPG on the 3PAR with no joy. Windows is reporting 440GB used on the LUN, but in the 3PAR IMC it says it's using 1077GB, and has reserved 1783GB for this volume(I've thin provisioned 2300GB). So I've lost 1343GB somewhere and can't figure out how to get it back.

    The only thing I can think of is to 'Tune' the LUN to a different CPG or SvMotion it and hope it only writes the 440GB? The problem is The only space I have is on nearline disk and the server needs FC performance.



  • 8.  RE: Reclaiming space on 3par

    Posted Jan 27, 2012 04:03 PM

    If you're running InForm OS 2.3.1, you may need to check if the "Copy Space Reclaim" option is enabled under the system properties. I ran into this after upgrading to 2.3.1 MU1. Apparently, it changed the Copy Space Reclaim setting to disabled. This has been fixed in subsequent builds and is enabled by default in 3.1.x.

    Hopefully that helps.