Hello,
My datastores are almost full, I need to reclaim some disk space from the thin-provision virtual disks, you know when we delete large files inside the virtual machine, the disk space is not free to the datastore. so my questions are:
Q1. For Windows VM, i can use the sdelete tool to zero out the deleted disk space, but for Linux VM is there any tool like this ? Or just use dd ?
Q2. Once i zero the deleted disk space in the VM, is it possible to reclaim the virtual disk's space via storage vmotion ? The KB(https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2004155) says when using Storage vMotion to move a thin disk between two VMFS volumes with the same block size, null blocks are not reclaimed. For VMFS-5, the VMFS block size is always 1MB, it seems that use storage vmotion to reclaim space is not possible. Does it mean "vmfstools -K" is the only way ?
Q3. Do i need to stop applications in the VM before running sdelete ? And do i need to shutdown the VM before running "vmfstools -K" ?
Thank you in advance.