All Units: Datastores

All Units with the unit selector set to datastores gives you every datastore in the estate with its utilization and VM density. It is the screen for finding storage hot spots before they become incidents, and underused capacity you have already paid for.

What this screen shows

Donut charts distributing datastores by vCenter, by cluster, and by VM density, over a table carrying size, used, % utilized, number of VMs, and VMDK counts with allocation indicators.

VM density is the one people skip. A datastore at moderate utilization but very high VM count behaves differently under load than one at the same utilization holding a few large disks, and it is a harder object to rebalance later.

When to use it

• Finding hot spots. Datastores nearing capacity, ranked, before someone gets paged about one.
• Finding the opposite. Underused datastores that represent capacity already purchased and available for rebalancing.
• Planning expansion or rebalancing. The distribution across vCenters and clusters tells you whether to buy or to move.

How to work it

• Sort by % storage utilized. The nearing-capacity datastores surface immediately.
• Filter by vCenter or cluster. Localized problems get isolated instead of being averaged into an estate-wide number that looks fine.

Tip: A high-utilization datastore and an over-provisioned datastore are different problems with different fixes. Check the allocation indicators alongside % utilized before deciding whether you need more capacity or tighter provisioning.

Related screens

VM Datastore Mapping tells you which workloads sit on a datastore once you have identified it. Orphaned VMDKs is often the cheapest way to reclaim space on a full datastore. Free Space by Group shows the same question from the array side.