As you deploy more and more VMs in your environment, you can run into a situation wherein the amount of free space in a datastore may not be sufficient for daily operations, such as backups, which involve taking snapshots. Free space can be added to the VMFS datastore if the storage device backing the VMFS volume can be increased in size as well. Alternatively, you could use another LUN to extend the VMFS volume onto it. The procedure to extend the datastore will be covered in the next recipe, Extending a VMFS Datastore.
The decision to choose either method would depend on whether or not the storage administrator can increase the size of the LUN device backing the VMFS volume.
The procedure to resize/expand the LUN in the storage array differs from vendor to vendor, and, as this is beyond the scope of this book, we assume that the LUN either...