New user of the form and 3PAR - be gentle! We just got our 1st 3PAR (4-node V800) and plan to migrate our entire vSphere 5.0 enviroment to it. However we immidately ran into an issue that we can't seem to locate anwser to. Our current volumes reside on EVA8400 and all VMDKs are Lazy Zero provisioned. We can easly migrate these to Eager Zero when doing sVmotion to 3PAR volumes but is there additional step to 'clean up the disk space" -- like runing SDelete? (we're Windows only shop). Any insight would be appriciated. Thanks!
Andrew
Migrating from EVA to 3PAR
Re: Migrating from EVA to 3PAR
Hi! Â We are about to do the same thing... Â EVA8100 to V400. Â Be keen to hear your experiences and thoughts.
My understanding (I am new to 3par and forum so also, be gentle, I am keen to learn if wrong)!
1 - vm vmdk deletes, zeros out the vmdk space on zero thick vmfs.
2 - zeros written in vmdk achieve thin persistence in vmfs.
3 - to write zeros in windows use sdelete. This will thin the VM writing zeros to unused or deleted file ntfs blocks in the vmdk, consiquently freeing up vmfs written space. Â Apparently it's good practice to run windows defrag before sdelete.
4 - to maintain thin persistence it's a good idea to run defrag and sdelete periodically in windows, since deleted files in ntfs aren't zeroed out on delete (hence requirement for sdelete).
I look forward to proving this in the next few weeks. Â Will update then.
Cheers John
My understanding (I am new to 3par and forum so also, be gentle, I am keen to learn if wrong)!
1 - vm vmdk deletes, zeros out the vmdk space on zero thick vmfs.
2 - zeros written in vmdk achieve thin persistence in vmfs.
3 - to write zeros in windows use sdelete. This will thin the VM writing zeros to unused or deleted file ntfs blocks in the vmdk, consiquently freeing up vmfs written space. Â Apparently it's good practice to run windows defrag before sdelete.
4 - to maintain thin persistence it's a good idea to run defrag and sdelete periodically in windows, since deleted files in ntfs aren't zeroed out on delete (hence requirement for sdelete).
I look forward to proving this in the next few weeks. Â Will update then.
Cheers John
Re: Migrating from EVA to 3PAR
We ended up using SDelete and PS script (http://blog.whatsupduck.net/2012/03/pow ... elete.html) to zero out the space inside OS. And this needs to be done on occasional basis to take adventage of TP. All in all somewhat painful process to take adventage of TP.