Hi,
I hope anyone here is running a setup similar to mine, because I can't figure this out based on the documentation and I can't live-test this right now.
Setup:
*ESXi 6.5 (full patched soft & firmware) on HPE DL360p's
*HPE MSA2042 w/ one-to-latest firmware (008)
*Fibre Channel over Brocade Fabric switches, QLogic HBA's (HPE variant) in the hosts
*all thin provisioned VMFS volumes on MSA2042
*all datastores in VMFS6 (thin prov), and all datastores have the auto-unmap turned on (by default Low prio).
Issue:
*the deletion of VM's doesn't free the space on the Volume and thus on the Disk Groups. It shows free in the VMFS. To get the space back in the SAN, I need to empty & delete the volume.
*VAAI counters such as MBDEL in ESXTOP remain at 0 unless I manually run "esxcli storage vmfs unmap" on the datastore, which recovers some but not all the space. More importantly, I cannot run this anymore as it seems to have had such a performance impact a few datastores went down (APD?!?!) so no testing this before confirmation by VMware I can run it safely.
*!!! I should not need to run it
Note: If you are using VMFS6 in ESXi 6.5, this article is not applicable."
*the MSA2042's best practices sheet (https://www.hpe.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA4-6892ENW.pdf) clearly states VAAI and T10 unmap compatibility
*the vmware HCL lists the 2042 as capable of: "VAAI-Block Thin Provisioning, HW Assisted Locking, Full Copy, Block Zero" VMW HCL SAN
*according to this article by Cormac Hogan, the HCL should list a "footnote" to support Automatic Unmap
Question: should I be expecting auto-unmap on this array?
Vmware support pointed me to HPE. On ESXi side, everything is ok (VAAI support detected, enabled, etc.)
ps: support case id 17508974807
thank you
Quentin
