OK thank you for the detailed reply. Let me try to clarify what I"m trying to do. Suppose I am a VMware admin and I want to manage resources well. Among my many goals here are some:
Goal 1: I provision lots of VMs every day, and requesters always ask for bigger virtual disks than they need. I don't want to provision 1000 VMs with 100 GB of vdisks per VM, when users are only going to ever use 30 GB per VM over the life of the VM. At least from my perspective, if I did that it would be waste. In other words, I want to manage the size of the virtual disks I provision responsibly. I want to manage how large of virtual disks I create. If users requested huge virtual disks for 100 VMs and a year later aren't using half the space they requested, I want to report on it. Do I understand correctly that you are saying vCOps can't do that?
Goal 2: I ask the storage team for LUNs every day. In general I want to be able to view my datastores from the perspective that I am requesting the size I need, not too much or too little, and using the amount of space on that datastore responsibly. I don't want to have too much unused space, and the space that has data on it is data that I actually need to have there (not powered off and unused VMs, etc). I want to manage space within my datastore well. This is what I would try to do by looking at waste from the perspective of a datastore. (That is a good goal, but it happens not to be what I'm after at the moment)
I go into the standard UI and select the "world" Object. I go to "operations->All Metrics->Virtual Machine->Waste->Disk Space to view info relevant to goal 1. What you are saying is that this info is not intended to help goal 1. So then where do I see info that would help me acheive goal 1 in vCOps? I think goal 1 is pretty common in the industry so I would be very suprised to find that vCOps can't assist toward that.
factor1, 2 ->
Those are configurable. Open vSphereUI->Configuration; Select 'Manage policies', pick a policy, do 'edit' and look at sections 3 and 4.
You define the rules when a VM is to be tagged as idle. But when it is, all the resources assigned to it are considered as a reclaimable waste. CPUs, memory assigned, and disk-space used(total).
So if I have a 100GB VM and it is taggled idle 30% of the time, how much of that 100GB is considered waste? 30GB?
It seems to me that somewhere or at some point VMware has to publish the details of what these specific places in vCOps are actually calculating and what is factored into them, if someone reading them is going to make practical use of them, so that the community has an objective reference point.