Reclaiming space on the storage system

Although NTFS tracks the available space on a LUN when files are deleted or modified, it does not report the new information to the storage system. You can run the space reclamation PowerShell cmdlet on the Plug-in for Windows host to ensure that newly freed blocks are marked as available in storage.

Before you begin

If you are running the cmdlet on a remote plug-in host, you must have run the SnapCenter Open-SMConnection cmdlet to open a connection to the SnapCenter Server.

About this task

You must ensure that the space reclamation process has completed before performing a restore operation.
If the LUN is shared by hosts in a Windows Server failover cluster, you must perform space reclamation on the host that owns the cluster group.
For optimum storage performance, you should perform space reclamation as often as possible.
You should ensure that the entire NTFS file system has been scanned.
Space reclamation is time-consuming and CPU-intensive, so it is usually best to run the operation when storage system and Windows host usage is low.
Space reclamation reclaims nearly all available space, but not 100 percent.
You should not run disk defragmentation at the same time as you are performing space reclamation.
Doing so can slow the reclamation process.

Procedure

From the application server PowerShell command prompt, enter the following command: Invoke-SdHostVolumeSpaceReclaim -Path drive_path

drive_path is the drive path mapped to the LUN.