1. Proposed title of this feature request

Prevent orphaned VMDK files on VMWare storage

2. What is the nature and description of the request?

When an OpenShift cluster uses VMWare as the backing storage for it's workloads, persistent volumes are created as VMDK files on the VMWare backing storage. When the persistant volume is removed from OpenShift, it removes the reference from OCP so there is no longer a pointer to the correlating VMDK file, but the file is not removed from the VMWare storage. This is resulting in orphaned files that can no longer be identified as belonging to any specific workload (vm, pod, etc.), so it is impossible to even manually clean up these orphaned files from the VMWare side, as you do not know where they came from and which ones are in use and which ones aren't.

This happens irrespective of the reclaimPolicy defined in the storageclass. The behavior is the same whether it is set to Retain or Delete.

3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

It is inefficient to leave large files orphaned on expensive storage. Additionally, VMWare storage imposes a 60TB per volume limitation, and this particular customer is using 58.8 TB, nearly exhausting the space on this volume which will likely lead to impactful downtime.

4. List any affected packages or components.

OpenShift 14.y.z (all versions)
csi.vsphere.vmware.com (all currently known versions)