Hi
I have some doubts when it comes to some storage data that can be found on vSphere/vCenter:
1. vSAN storage capacity:
Capacity disks are HDDs.
While checking Cluster - Monitor - Capacity - Usage breakdown I can see around 10TB used for VMDKs
(around 5TB for "Primary data" and the same for "Replica usage" as "vSAN default storage policy" uses RAID-1 with these HDDs)
According to the VMware documentation "Provisioned space" data comes from doubling the whole disks storage for a certain VM
(so f.eg. if VM has 2x100GB=200GB disks configured then the "Provisioned space" storage should be around 400GB).
However, even based on the theory it's not quite accurate all the times - why is that?
When it comes to "Used space" storage for the VM - if I'm not mistaken it should be the sum of the data that is currently written on the OS on the configured disks but for me it doesn't seem to be always accurate as well.
It seems that "Used space" is closer to the actual sum of sizes of the VMDKs but it's not actually a full reference to the VMDKs.
VMDKs are the disks that are showing the actual consumed data and if any data is deleted, on the OS you can see it right away but the VMDK doesn't shrink then as it sees only let's say "touched blocks" not currently written data.
Can someone then confirm when does this data exactly come from and how it's always best to calculate it?
"Provisioned space"
"Used space"
"VMDK"
I also have problems with calculations when it comes to the standalone ESXi host and its local storage. I was also wondering what policy for storing data has "Default storage policy" so the default one for the storage.
Any help, explanation, link, calculators will be appreciated.