JohnMH wrote:
No the defrag and compact are not the same. The defrag process is an array internal process that occurs periodically (there is no way to control this manually today). The defrag process wakes up periodically and scans for VV's with free reserved space, once found the system will attempt to defrag the pages into contiguous 128MB regions. Once you have contiguous 128MB regions these are returned back to the CPG for reuse by any volume using that CPG. The CPG compact process then collects these 128MB regions from the owning CPG and returns them back to the system as a whole for reuse by any valid CPG.
"My backup solution is VEEAM, which makes a snapshot of each vm each day, and removes it afterwards. That, i assume, will also take up space after deletion?"
If the Snap VV is deleted after use, then the space will be returned to the CPG for reuse by any VV or snap in that CPG, if you have enough returned space then the compact CPG will return this to the system. However there's no need to run the compact so often, the returned space is already available for reuse within the CPG for your growing volumes or next set of snapshots. As such assuming you compact and return the space to the system nightly, the next time the CPG grows to accommodate writes it will just claw the space back, so you're probably just making the system work harder than it needs to.
I see, ok.
Well yestoday i ran the vmware commands on our lun's, and i was able to free up almost 300 GB on one of the luns - however the 3par console says something different. Here is a few screenshots to explain: