Reclaiming Space on a Clustered Shared Volume

[ronnoco]

Hello all,

 

It has come to my attention today that we are really low on space on our cluster shared volume. I deleted some old virtual machines that were pretty large (700GB) and have many more that can go to free up plenty of space however, I have made sure the files I have deleted are not in the recycle bin on any of the Nodes but the space hasn't changed on the cluster.

 

I have looked for a hidden recycle bin in C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1 but cant find one.

 

I did some research and found the sdelete command but gosh, I feel nervous about using this!

 

Is there any easier way of reclaiming space? We have a Dell EqualLogic SAN and I looked at the SAN HQ software but couldn't find anything obvious.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

Gary

[jthompson]

Do you have any capacity on the SAN to create an additional cluster shared volume? If so, perhaps try that and move VMs over using the 'Move Virtual Machine Storage' thingy. I'm wondering whether in doing that it would also clean up after itself nicely on the original CSV and give you a route out the problem. That feels like safer ground than the sdelete command you mentioned.

 

I'm relatively new to failover clusters so have yet to encounter a full CSV.

[ronnoco]

Thanks for the reply. All the files I need to remove were VM's that have been shut down, removed from the cluster and I just want to remove the data. I'm relatively new to this as well and quite frankly, not a fan of SAN's and Failover Clusters - great when they work, horrendous when they go wrong!

 

I got a bit further as when I log on to the Node that owned the VM as local admin, the files I deleted were in the recycle bin. As soon as I deleted them, the storage is healthy again so that's good. Strange that you only see them as local admin, no idea why. Another very odd problem I also noticed is that a 600GB vdx file that I deleted from the cluster has come back and has no attributes what so ever, you cant take ownership. It looks like it is stuck in the delete process. I have used Lock Hunter to delete and it will be removed the next time the system restarts.

 

Thanks again for the reply.

Edited February 4, 2021 by ronnoco

[ronnoco]

Just updating that I deleted another large file (400GB) which also didn't remove nicely. Again, used file locker to unlock and scheduled the delete on next server restart.

 

I have just live migrated all the vm's to another Node and restarted and now, those files are deleted. 1.5TB of free space now, phew!