The Space Utilization by Virtual Machine chart displays the amount of space used by the five virtual machines with the most space used on the datastore or the datastores in the cluster.

Note: This chart does not show historical statistics. It only shows the most recently available data, which may be up to 30 minutes late, depending on when the last statistics rollup occurred. In addition, statistics are not collected across all datastores at one time. They are collected asynchronously.

The Space Utilization by Virtual Machine chart is located in the Space view of the datastore Performance tab. The counter can also be displayed for datastore cluster charts.

Table 1. Data Counters
Chart Label Description
virtual_machine Amount of datastore space used by the five virtual machines with the most used datastore space.
  • Counter: used
  • Stats Type: Absolute
  • Unit: Gigabytes (GB)
  • Rollup Type: Latest
  • Collection Level: 1

Chart Analysis

The datastore is at full capacity when the used space is equal to the capacity. Allocated space can be larger than datastore capacity, for example, when you have snapshots and thin-provisioned disks. If possible, you can provision more space to the datastore, or you can add disks to the datastore or use shared datastores.

If snapshot files are consuming high datastore space, consider consolidating them to the virtual disk when they are no longer needed. Consolidating the snapshots deletes the redo log files and removes the snapshots from the vSphere Client user interface. For information about consolidating the data center, see the vSphere documentation.