Out of space ZFS volume housing empty esxi datastore

[darkwarrior]

Look at what I said earlier:
When you create a non-sparse (aka thickprovisioned) zvol UNMAP will not work.
When you create a sparse (aka thinprovisioned) zvol UNMAP will work.

I'm not using my zvols on ESXi but directly on a Windows server (VM) and I had to create a sparse volume to be able to run UNMAP from within that guest. Else it does not work. ;)

Edit: Can you make the test to create a sparse volume and see how it behaves ?

 

[yanky83]

Well, it does work, I can manually run unmap from the esxi host (esxcli storage vmfs unmap -l san5__tank1__vol_vmware01), and it frees referenced storage, certainly wont shrink the volume as a whole, but that not the intention either. So, esxi definitely does tell ZFS, which areas are free.

Hyper-V seems to do that automatically (from hat Ive read esxi 5 used to to it too, but it was deactivated due to overloads, and re-activated in 6.5)

I will try to do some testing with the -s switch, cheers.