MCS StorageView

Alongside a few other cool tools MightyCare Solutions have released StorageView.
This handy little app will give you visibility of your Virtual Machines’ disk status in a very friendly GUI.
Read all about it here and download it here.

Here is some of the converstation which happened between me and the owner of this tool "Peter Rudolf". He was kind enough to explain me few things about this tool. For us managing a big environment is always a big challange.

VIKASH :

What does "How Many Gigabyte you can when you decrease the partition of your VMs" suppose to mean ? Are you trying to show that how much space can be saved ? If that is the case then how does you calculated?

PETER:

Please notice that the tool make a Snapshot of need Diskspace. I don´t check the needed Space of the virtual Machine periodically. This time ;-)
As the first View off the needed Space for the Virtual Machine I check how many Bytes the virtual Machine has in Use by Data and how many has it free, without data.
After that you can say, ok, my virtual Machine need overall and ever 5 Gigabytes free Diskspace to work. (maybe it is more or less (printqueue or Batchprograms that need temporary space))
If not ( and for that question we need a Scheduling to check every hour or so) you can decrease the partition of the virtual machine to save Storage of the physical LUN (because Physical Storage are expensive), You must also decrease the filesize of the VMDK File of the LUN to save spaces.
The sentence of „ How Many Gigabyte you can when you decrease the partition of your VMs” means, if you decrease the logical Partitions of the Virtualmachine AND decrease the VMDK File on the physical Storage (or the RAW-Devices) you can save Money.
It Calculate the Values per virtual Machine of all logical Partition - Freespace + needed 5 GB (as variable in the Program). In Result it calculate the Summery of all need Space + 5 GB per Log. Volume for need Space for all virtual Machine in the Datacenter.
OR and that is also a result of that, you can save the complete Storage if you using thinprovioning on the LUN.
Example: If you use NFS as a Datastore you only use the spaces on the Datastore that is really needed. Because on NFS VMware store the VMDK File in a COW-Format (copy on Write). A 10 Gigabyte logical Partition with 5 Gigabyte Data has only 5 Gigabyte on a NFS SHARE.