VMware ESXi datastore tools

Luke · 9 Dec 2009 at 15:22

Is anyone running any tools for managing datastores?
I'm trying to get something similar to treesize which will help give me the largest of the VM's in the datastore.

I'd rather not view each one folder by folder, and my unix skills aren't up to much!

DRZ · 9 Dec 2009 at 17:06

There are tools out there that can report this for you such as vFogLight, but if you dont want to pay, get to the terminal in ESXi (type unsupported at the "blank" command prompt (alt+F2)), log in as root, cd to the vmfs folder which is your datastore and use the du command to show you files and their sizes. If you have trouble, look at the man page for du and you can work out the best commands to use to get it to show it to you how you want (pro tip: -h gives it to you in human-readable format!)

You can pipe that to a file if you want to get it into excel or whatever!

Quick question though, unless you thin provisioned each machine shouldn't you know exactly how big each VM is???

Luke · 9 Dec 2009 at 17:27

That sounds just the job!
I know what you mean, but they are a mixture of TP VM's and my team have added disks in some cases so some folders may well be larger than originally deployed.

Damn, du isn't in esxi.

kippermitten · 10 Dec 2009 at 16:54

RVTools is a free app that enumerates datastores on ESXi and ESX and VSphere, that will list what you need to find.

Perry.

Luke · 14 Dec 2009 at 17:02

That's perfect! Many thanks, that's really going to help me out.