I'm curious about how we could take advantage of NetApp data dedupe, if we're using FC LUNs. I realize with NFS the issue is much simpler. But let's assume we don't have NFS for the moment...
If we present a 500GB LUN to ESX, and make that into a VMFS volume..the OS owns the volume. Then we put 400GB of data on that volume. On the back end, that should dedupe down to say 300GB of data. But wouldn't VMware still see 400GB of a 500GB volume used? Where does the space savings happen?
The LUN is still 500GB within the NetApp, so we're not seeing the savings there either (we can't hand out more LUNs thanks to dedupe can we?)
Basically how do we make use of the space savings of data dedupe, if using FC LUNs.