Chapter 5. Troubleshooting Storage Capacity and Overcommitment

So far, we covered how to deal with storage visibility, contention, and performance issues. This leaves us with the final vSphere topics which we will cover that can affect storage; capacity and overcommitment. This chapter will cover how to use some simple monitoring tools, alarms, and features included within vSphere that can help to alert us and resolve storage capacity problems. It is important to note that not all features are included in all licensing editions of vSphere, so we will also cover how to manually free up space on our datastores and how to extend or grow our datastores in the event that we no longer have free space available.

This chapter will cover the following:

• Monitoring datastore usage

• Thin Provisioning

• Snapshots

• Datastore file management

• Virtual machine swap files

• Increasing the size of our datastores

• Balancing capacity with Storage DRS