vSAN Cluster consuming excessive space in snapshots despite no active snapshots

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

When monitoring a vSAN environment, the Snapshot Usage report (found under the Capacity tab) may display excessive storage consumption—in some cases as high as 20 TB—even when a manual inventory check confirms that no virtual machines have active snapshots. 

Customer Symptoms:

• The vSphere Client reports high snapshot space utilization, but no snapshots are visible in the VM inventory.

• Standard reclamation efforts, such as deleting virtual machines to free up space, do not reduce the reported vSAN storage usage for snapshots.

• This discrepancy creates a false representation of available capacity, leading to concerns regarding storage exhaustion despite a "clean" snapshot inventory.

 

 

Environment

vSAN 8.0.3

 

Cause

This is a known user interface problem in which the snapshot usage report is delayed and doesn't report accurate snapshot usage. 

Resolution

The problem is expected to be fixed in VCF version 9.1.