Thin-provisioned LUN capacity Exceeded / The operation is not allowed in the current state of the datastore.

Hi All,

Has anyone seen this behavior before or could you help explain why this happening so that I can take the appropriate remedial action.

Basic summary of Infrastructure;

• vSphere 5.0 U2 with Ent Plus licences
• 30x ESXi 5.0 hosts - build 1254542
• HDS SAN - FC block storage (multiple 2TB LUNs) - SDRS cluster
• NetApp MetroCluster - NFS storage (multiple 5TB volumes) - SDRS cluster

We are currently tight on block storage capacity and are in the process of provisioning additional NFS storage - thin provisioning is widely use on both. On the HDS datastores I have the "Thin-provisioned LUN capacity Exceeded" alarm triggered, but there is still free space available on the datastore.

Yesterday I had the situation where I was unable to add any additional disks (even a small 10GB disk) or storage vMotion VM's between HDS datastores (except for 1 or 2 datastores out of 14) - NFS was unaffected. The error that I got in both cases was "The operation is not allowed in the current state of the datastore." The only way that I could resolve this was to restart the vCenter services. The first time everything worked for a few hours, and the the second time I restarted vCenter server completely.

Since then I have added an additional 2TB LUN to the SDRS cluster, and still have the "Thin-provisioned LUN capacity Exceeded" alarm triggered - but am able to storage vMotion to all HDS datastores. Capacity is currently as follows;

Name               FreeSpaceMB    CapacityMB

----               -----------    ----------

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      411980         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      391602         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      402413         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      427012         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      501918         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      394800         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      397538         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      398614         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      459313         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      306059         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      378631         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      392283         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      382561         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      396588         2047744

xxxxxxxxxxxxx      302924         2047744

So the questions are;

1. Has anyone seen this before or did vCenter just get into a wobble?
2. Do I need to be concerned about anything major?
3. Are there any other areas that I should check?

Thanks,

Jon