time machine tmutil delete reclaim free space

Watch the following video to learn more about how space reclamation works. However, the level of support is limited on VMFS5.ĭepending on the type of your VMFS datastore, you use different methods to configure space reclamation for the datastore and your virtual machines. Both VMFS5 and VMFS6 datastores can provide support to the unmap command that proceeds from the guest operating system. The command can also originate directly from the guest operating system. VMFS uses the SCSI unmap command to indicate to the array that the storage blocks contain deleted data, so that the array can unallocate these blocks. Stack Exchange network consists of 182 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

However, when the array is not aware that the data was deleted from the blocks, the blocks remain allocated by the array until the datastore releases them. These operations leave blocks of unused space on the storage array. Inside the virtual machine, storage space is freed when you delete files on the thin virtual disk. You free storage space inside the VMFS datastore when you delete or migrate the VM, consolidate a snapshot, and so on. With the VMFS5 datastore, you can manually reclaim storage space. The VMFS6 datastore can send the space reclamation command automatically. The command helps thin-provisioned storage arrays to reclaim unused space from the VMFS datastore and thin virtual disks on the datastore. ESXi supports the space reclamation command, also called SCSI unmap command, that originates from a VMFS datastore or a VM guest operating system.

Time machine tmutil delete reclaim free space