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Of course if you are using VVols you dont have to worry about UNMAP at all as the array has VM-level visibility and knows when VMs are deleted and can reclaim space on its own without vSphere telling it to.

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.

Not all functionality in the vSphere Web Client has been implemented for the vSphere Client in the vSphere 6.5 release.

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.

Note that now that the vSphere C Client is officially dead they are referring to the HTML5 client as the vSphere Client going forward.

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.

Doing this allowed thin provisioned storage arrays to maintain a much smaller capacity footprint.

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.

In many scenarios this wasnt 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 a result VMware quickly issued a KB article recommending to disable UNMAP support and in vSphere 5.0 Update 1 they completely disabled it.

While this worked it took quite a while to execute and was very resource intensive on the array.

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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.

You can read all about how this all worked in this post I did back then.

In vSphere 6.5 they have again made in an automatic operation but not in the same way as before.

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.

So it is truly an automatic process now but it operates in the background and how fast it works is based on priority levels that can be set on individual VMFS datastores.

When you create a VMFS6 datastore the default priority will be set to Low which sends UNMAP commands at a less frequent rate to the storage array.

In the vSphere Web Client you will only see the option to change this to either None or Low with None disabling UNMAP completely.

However using the esxcli command (esxcli storage vmfs reclaim config) you can also change this setting to Medium or High which increases the frequency in which UNMAP commands are sent by 2x (Medium) and 3x (High) over the Low setting.

When you get more aggressive with UNMAP commands it will start putting a heavier load on the storage array which can seriously impact your VM workloads as the array tries to handle everything at once.

Having this set to Low is a good compromise as you get your disk space back automatically but with minimal impact to your VM workloads.

If you do happen to set it to Medium or High via esxcli it will still show those settings in the Web Client, you just cant select them there.

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