Cleaning up old vSAN File Services OVF files on vCenter Server

There was a question last week about the vSAN File Services OVF Files, the question was about the location where they were stored. I did some digging in the past, but I don’t think I ever shared this. The vSAN File Services OVF is stored on vCenter Server (VCSA) in a folder, for each version. The folder structure looks as show below, basically each version of an OVF has a directory with required OVF files.

[email protected] [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/

total 24K

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 .

vsan-health root  4.0K Nov 11  2020 ..

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11  2020 ovf-7.0.1.1000

vsan-health users 4.0K Mar 12  2021 ovf-7.0.2.1000-17692909

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 24  2021 ovf-7.0.3.1000-18502520

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 ovf-7.0.3.1000-20036589

[email protected] [ ~ ]# ls -lha /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/ovf-7.0.1.1000/

total 1.2G

vsan-health users 4.0K Nov 11  2020 .

vsan-health users 4.0K Sep 16 16:09 ..

vsan-health users 179M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-cloud-components.vmdk

vsan-health users 5.9M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-log.vmdk

vsan-health users  573 Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.mf

vsan-health users  60K Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758_OVF10.ovf

vsan-health users 998M Nov 11  2020 VMware-vSAN-File-Services-Appliance-7.0.1.1000-16695758-system.vmdk

I’ve asked the engineering team, and yes, you can simply delete obsolete versions if you need the disk capacity.