Provisioned Space incorrect ESX4

[Sheridan]

I've got a simple ESX box with currently only one VM on it. The whole thing is on one physical server with a 550 Gb logical volume on local drives.

 

The VM itself has two drives (a 40 and a 300 GB drive) which is running Windows server. Within the VM the drives all appear correct and both are only about 50% full.

 

But looking at the VM in the VSpere client it shows it has 720gb of 'provisioned space' and 550gb of used space. I understand that ESX will see 550 as the available space on the datastore, but only 340 of that is allocated to the VM.

 

Where on earth is it reading the 720 GB of provisioned space from? The physical raid 5 array (3 * 300gb drives) wouldn't show 720 anyway?

 

I'm pretty new to ESX and this is a trial but this is baffling me as I don't know where these figures are being read from.

[Sheridan]

Well I managed to find out what the problem was, it was an old snapshot that had been taken a while ago. It took quite a bit of space up and deleting it took around 8 hours to complete. I didn't even know a snapshot was there!

 

Once it finished, the free space etc is reporting as normal.

 

Can I just say, ESX and Server 2008 gets a thumbs up for allowing me to dynamically extend a partition on the fly!