Where did my Free'd up space go???

[jkoelker01]

I have a NETAPP FAS2020 in which I am using for my Virtual Vsphere environment. On one of my volumes today I was trying to clean up old folders from previous servers. One folder had 19 GB in it which I deleted. Prior to the deletion the volume had 104.13 GB of free space. After I deleted that 19 GB folder it went down to 103.85  GB of free space. Someone on the VM communities told me that the Netapp device might be doing a background deletion and will just mark the space as re-use. Is this true? How do I really tell how much free space I have available then? Essentially I can't trust looking in my Vcenter server environment to really know how much free space is available.

[ekashpureff]

Check for snapshots on the NetApp.

Once the snapshots are deleted, the space will be freed.

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff

[jkoelker01]

I tried deleting the snapshots but it says "Cannot Delete File - path of the snapshot...." Any ideas? I was able to delete the folders through the datastore in VCenter with no issues. Is there a way to do this through a console or something.

[ekashpureff]

Snapshots can't be deleted from a client, they're read-only versions of the filesystem.

You can delete them from console, Filerview, or System Manager.

See the man page for the snap command.

snap list volumename

snap delete volumename snapname

or

snap delete volumename -a   (to delete all snapshots)

Please use with care if this is a production environment,

you may need those snapshots...

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff

[jkoelker01]

Do you know how to delete an individual snapshot for a server. If I were to do snap delete vmwarevol1 hourly.0 it will then delete all snapshots in there. How do I delete individual snapshots under hourly.0? Sorry to be a pain, but I really do appreciate the help.

[ekashpureff]

No pain, happy to help.

You can't delete invidual VMs from a snapshot, you can only delete snapshots from the volume.

You'll have to wait 'till you're done with that snapshot before you'll get to use that space...

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff

[jkoelker01]

So I deleted my hourly.1 snapshot off of the volume and the space still doesn't show as increased within my Vcenter. It actually went down a little bit again. I'm confused. Is there a command to show the amount of free space on a volume through the console? Thanks.

[ekashpureff · Accepted solution]

On the command line you can use:

snap list

snap delta

snap reclaimable

You won't get the free space back until you've deleted all snapshots

that had pointers to that VM.

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff