topic VMWare NFS datastore free space is much less than the Volume free space on the NetApp volume in VMware Solutions Discussions

VMWare NFS datastore free space is much less than the Volume free space on the NetApp volume

bruce_storage — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:09:15 GMT

WMare version 5.1 ESXi we have the following issue:

Datastore in the VSC 5.0 or the VMware client and compared with the NetApp OnCommand System Manager for the Volume have a huge descrepancy in free space.

Datastore and the Volume show the same Total size of 4.6 TB

However the Datastore in the VMware client or the VSC show there is only 370GB of free space on the NFS Datastore.

The corresponding Volume in System Manger shows 1.63 TB for free space on the volume.

Re: VMWare NFS datastore free space is much less than the Volume free space on the NetApp volume

asulliva — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:16:37 GMT

Hello Bruce,

This is odd/interesting, as it is the inverse of the situation we typically see. Can you provide any more information?

What version of Data ONTAP are you using?
Volume settings, e.g. deduplication, compression
Is there anything unusual in the volume? If you browse the contents, are there things other than VMs in there?
What type of VMDKs do you provision? Thin, thick? Eager zeroed, lazy zeroed?
Do you have any snapshots on the volume and/or on any virtual machines?
Is the volume thin provisioned? If so, is the aggregate over provisioned?

Thank you,

Andrew