Downsize flexvols and reclaim storage on vSphere 6 and ONTAP 8.2.3 7-Mode

RANJBASSI — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 19:13:08 GMT

Hi All

I am in the process of reclaiming back some storage from our NetAPP FAS array after removing many VMs from our VMware environment.

If I perform a data cleansing I figured I should be able to reclaim about 20% storage back from the whole array which will be a lot for us.

Now I worked with space reclaimation in the past on NetApp arrays but in a vSphere 5 environment and know there are some command differences that are run on the esxi host and some settings need to be made in ONTAP to allow this to happen.

My question is does anyone have any best way to tackle this? Has anyone done this in a vSphere 6 environment?

My plan is to decommission a few datastores which will also allow me to decommsion the underlying flexvols/luns for these and I plan to move some VMs using storage vmotion to consolidate some VMs to already existing storage, this should give us improved dedupe and space savings.

My questions is would it be worth me running the space reclaim tasks first to give me an updated and realstic view of the space savings or would I better doing my chopping and changing/ removal of datastores first and then perform the reclaimation tasks?

Just for further info, I am running FAS8020 with Data ONTAP 8.2.3 7-mode using Fibre Channel SAN volumes which are snapmirrored to another filer.

Thank you in advance for any tips and advice/guidence anyone can provide.

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Downsize flexvols and reclaim storage on vSphere 6 and ONTAP 8.2.3 7-Mode