Hello Martin,  Re: EQL GUI values.  That's the correct behavior.  By default block storage devices are not informed when a file is deleted.  In fact a delete is a write to an allocation table maintained solely by the OS's filesystem.  There is a new SCSI command that more and more filesystems are supporting.  SCSI UNMAP.  AKA Space Reclaim.  When a file is deleted, the host sends an UNMAP command with the starting LBA and number of blocks after that to free.  EQL breaks up space into 15MB pages, when an entire page is unallocated, it is returned to free space on a thin provisioned volume.  If the volume is thick provisioned just the in-use space will go down.  Part 2.  When VMware creates a 40GB VM, even with thick provisioned VMDKs, it doesn't actually write out 40GB.  No where near in fact.  It does however deduct 40GB from the allocation table in the VMFS Datastore.   If you are not using EQL replication (async or sync) you can free up some space manually using their CLI utility.  For ESXi v5.5 and v6.0 here's how to run that utility.  [URL] Regards,  Don  
Hello, SAN HQ and the EqualLogic Group Manager report only 10% left space on one of our EqualLogic 6210xs volumes. We have two VMWare VMs with thin disks residing on that volume. No snapshot space used or reserved. The vSphere client reports a totally different amount of space left (much more). I understand that a block storage device cannot be aware of the correct amount of space beeing used on the volume by the OS. Is that correct? If so, I ask myself why this function (show space utilization) was implemented in first place in storage managers if it cannot work reliable at this level? Should I instead deactivate all kind of volume reports and warnings at storage layer and delegate this function to the OS (in my case create respective alarms in vsphere client for space utilization)? Thanks a lot. Best regards Martin
Space utilization reported