Determining when to reclaim space on a thin reclamation LUN

When a thin LUN is used as a Veritas Volume Manager disk, the space is allocated only on an application write. Storage space is allocated from the free pool when files are created and written to in the file system. However, this storage is not automatically released to the free pool when data is deleted from a file system. As a result, all thin LUNs have a tendency to become thicker over time, with increased amounts of wasted storage (storage that is allocated but does not support application data).

As a storage administrator, you need to determine when to trigger the thin reclamation. The thin reclamation process can be time consuming, depending on various factors such as the size and fragmentation of the file system. The decision is a balance between how much space can be reclaimed, and how much time the reclaim operation will take.

The following considerations may apply:

More Information

Displaying VxFS file system usage on thin reclamation LUNs

Configuring automatic reclamation