Datastore Capacity Dashboard

The Datastore Capacity dashboard complements out of the box capacity pages and dashboards. It focuses on storage, provides an overall picture, and highlights the datastores that need attention.

Design Considerations

See Capacity Dashboards for common design consideration among all the dashboards for capacity management.

How to Use the Dashboard

The Datastore Capacity dashboard is layered, gradually providing details as you work top-down in the dashboard.

• Overall Analysis

  The summary banner answer basic questions such as number of datastores, the capacity, number of VMs, and the running VMs.

  The distribution charts are Shared Datastores by Capacity Remaining and Shared Datastores by Time Remaining.

  There are three heat maps, the primary being the Remaining Capacity heat map. The two other heat maps cover used capacity. One of them is designed for an environment that uses datastore clusters. Each box represents a datastore. If you have many datastores, the heat map will group them. You can further see the members. The larger the datastore, the larger the box.

  The Shared Datastores table lists the shared datastores. The table provides a summary, displaying all the datastores at a glance. They are grouped by data center. By default, the table is sorted by the least capacity remaining. There are three reclamation opportunities: powered off VM, snapshot, and orphaned VMDK.

• Datastore Analysis

  Select a datastore from the Summary table. The capacity details are automatically displayed. A snapshot that lasts beyond a few days should be investigated. Orphaned VMDK are the ones that are not associated to any VM.

  For disk space, the total capacity, allocated capacity, and the actual capacity used are displayed.
• VM Analysis

  To analyse at the VM level, review the VMs in the datastore table. Click on the VM you want to investigate further to see usage over time.

• Local Datastores

  The Local Datastores Capacity table appears at the end of the dashboard. Avoid running VMs on local data stores, unless the storage requirements can be met with a local disk and does not need vMotion.

Points to Note

If the underlying LUN is also thin provisioned, add visibility into the physical array. The dashboard does not have datastore clusters. If your environment uses datastore clusters, modify this dashboard or create a new one. In a large environment with many datastores and datastore clusters, add a View List to list the datastore clusters, so you get summary information. Alternatively, create a heat map, listing the datastore clusters.