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What they did was kind of a compromise, instead of trying to do it all as a synchronous operation they are now scheduling it and sending UNMAP commands in bursts to the storage array in an asynchronous manner. In vSphere 6.5 they have again made in an automatic operation but not in the same way as before. So since that time VMware has never figured out a way to make it work again until now. You can read all about how this all worked in this post I did back then.

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The end result was that instead of reclaiming just the blocks from deleted VMs it tried to reclaim all the remaining free space on the VMFS volume which was terribly inefficient.

#Vsphere 6.5 update manager manual#

The reason for that is all the manual operation was doing was creating a balloon file using un-used space on a VMFS volume and then sending UNMAP commands to the array to reclaim it all. While this worked it took quite a while to execute and was very resource intensive on the array. What VMware did next was introduce a manual reclamation method by modifying the vmkfstools CLI command and adding a parameter to it that allowed UNMAP to run on an array as a manual operation. As a result VMware quickly issued a KB article recommending to disable UNMAP support and in vSphere 5.0 Update 1 they completely disabled it.

In many scenarioвЂ™s this wasnвЂ™t a problem, but some arrays apparently had problems completing the operation in a timely manner which would cause timeouts and disk errors in vSphere. As the UNMAP operation was real-time (synchronous) vSphere would have to wait back for a response from the array that the operation was complete. Shortly after this feature was introduced in vSphere 5.0 which was released back in 2012 problems started surfacing. Doing this allowed thin provisioned storage arrays to maintain a much smaller capacity footprint. UNMAP was supposed to fix that so when data was deleted vSphere would send a string of UNMAP commands to the array telling it exactly which disk blocks it could have back. This was a welcome feature as block storage arrays have no visibility inside a VMFS volume so when any data is deleted by vSphere the array is unaware of it and it remains allocated on the array. The new vSphere Client is built into the vSphere 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance, you can get the latest HTML5 client builds at the VMware Fling page as it is also delivered independently of vSphere and works with vSphere 6.0 & 6.5.ДЄ long time ago in a vSphere version far, far away VMware introduced support for automatic space reclamation which allowed vSphere to send UNMAP commands to a storage array so space from deleted or moved VMs could be un-allocated (reclaimed) on the storage array. Note that now that the vSphere C# Client is officially dead they are referring to the HTML5 client as the vSphere Client going forward. This link to VMwareвЂ™s documentation provides a pretty long list of over 200 unsupported functionality actions in the HTML5 client. Not really an ideal situation and hopefully VMware kicks it into high gear with the HTML5 client development so you can use it without limitations.

#Vsphere 6.5 update manager full#

So in vSphere 6.5 you pretty much have two options for managing your vSphere environment: use the older, flash based web client that is fully functional, or use the new HTML5 web client which performs much better but is not full functional so you have to keep switching back to the flash based web client. Not all functionality in the vSphere Web Client has been implemented for the vSphere Client in the vSphere 6.5 release. vSphere 6.5 introduces the new HTML5-based vSphere Client, which ships with vCenter Server alongside the vSphere Web Client. vSphere 6.5 does not support this client and it is not included in the product download. From the vSphere 6.5 release notes:ДЄs of vSphere 6.5, VMware is discontinuing the installable desktop vSphere Client, one of the clients provided in vSphere 6.0 and earlier. The new HTML5 web based client is much faster then the old flash client and is a great improvement but the only problem is that its only half done and has a lot of limitations right now. Now that vSphere 6.5 is here VMware delivered on their promise to eliminate the C# client in vSphere 6.5 in lieu of the new HTML5 client that they have been working on to replace the current flash-based vSphere web client that everybody hates on. Earlier this year I wrote about the end of life for our beloved vSphere C# thick client.