The Datastore Utilization dashboard helps you identify storage provisioning and utilization patterns in a virtual infrastructure.

As a best practice, ensure that the datastores are of standard size, to manage storage in your virtual environments. The heat map on this dashboard displays all the datastores monitored by vRealize Operations and groups them by clusters.

The dashboard uses colors to depict the utilization pattern of the datastores. Grey represents an underutilized datastore, red represents a datastore that has run out of disk space, and green represents an optimally used datastore. You can select a datastore from the dashboard to see the past utilization trends and forecasted usage. The dashboard lists all the VMs that run on the selected datastore. You can reclaim storage used by large VM snapshots or powered off VMs.

You can use the vRealize Operations action framework to reclaim resources by deleting the snapshots or unwanted powered off VMs.

  • Datastore Capacity and Utilization: Use this widget to find out which datastores are overused and which ones are underused. You can also find out whether the datastores are of equal size. When you select a datastore from this widget, the dashboard is automatically populated with the relevant data.
  • VMs in the Selected Datastore: Use this widget to view a list of VMs based on the datastore you select. You can also view relevant details such as whether the VMs are powered on and the size of the snapshot if any.
  • Usage Trend of Selected Datastore: Use this widget to find out the trends in capacity used by a selected datastore as against the total capacity available.
  • All Shared Datastores in the Environment: Use this widget to view a list of datastores that are shared in your environment. The information displayed in this widget helps you make an informed decision about whether you have to rebalance the capacity of the datastores based on usage.