I'm currently running ESXi 5.5 with two data stores on thick provisioned eqallogic volumes with firmware 8.1.8. After my latest firmware upgrade the alerts for low pool space have started to tell me that I have less than 3% free space in my group. I have adequate free space within the VMW datastores to accommodate up to 5% free.
My questions are:
a) Is it worth changing these to thin provisioned and reclaiming the free space in order to maintain 5% pool free space?
b) If I make this change on the Equallogic volumes to thin provisioned, am I risking any data loss on the VMW datastores?
c) In order to make this change, is it as simple as checking "Enable Thin Provisioning" on group manager, reconfiguring the allocations and then running the unmap command to reclaim the free space?
Thanks!