Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability provides the ability to reclaim unused space on thin-provisioned arrays, without needing to stop application I/O. The Veritas File System (VxFS) file system must be mounted.

You can trigger thin reclamation on one or more disks, disk groups, or enclosures. The reclamation process scans the specified storage for the VxVM volumes that have a mounted VxFS file system. Each volume is analyzed for any previously allocated space that the VxFS file system no longer uses. The unused space is released to the free storage pool on the thin array. The reclamation skips any volumes that do not have a mounted VxFS file system. The reclamation process also releases the space for any volumes or plexes that are marked as pending reclamation.

A full reclamation process also scans the specified storage for free space that is outside of the VxVM volumes.

Thin Reclamation takes a considerable amount of time when you reclaim thin storage on a large number of LUNs or an enclosure or disk group. As with other long-running operations, VxVM creates a task for a reclaim operation. You can monitor the reclaim operation with the vxtask command.

See Monitoring Thin Reclamation using the vxtask command.