Vmware / 3PAR (T10 Unmap)

[BigKiwiSteve]

As many of you will have experienced, we've been battling with reclaiming zero space on our 3PAR especially where we've been performing storage vMotions / deletion of disks from guests for some time now.

As such, we've written the attached powershell to run a 'zeroing' process within our VMware / 3PAR environment which in effect:
a) connects with the specified vCenter server
b) locates all datastores which match any input parameters (will select all by default)
c) creates a new VM guest with a name aligned with the datastore and a random number
d) creates 50GB disks (EagerZeroThick) attached to this guest until the required space is filled (to a minimum 'space' level determined at runtime)
e) deletes the guest (and disks) returning the space to the 3PAR for re-use

I've got this working in serial i.e. one datastore after another which seems to work nicely for us in our environment (100TB useable)

Please use ZeroDatastores.ps1 -? for details on how to use

Let me know if this is any use to the community.

Cheers

Steve

[Richard Siemers]

Thanks for sharing! Good stuff!

[viama]

see also http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?micrositeID=&popup=true&languageId=&externalID=2014849 for ESX5.1 space reclamation command line tool.