Merging Replica Checkpoints

[Matthew Dickens]

Apologies if this has already been answered but my searches didn't return anything that answered my question.

I have a few replicas whose source VMs have recently had their drives compacted to remove whitespace from historical bloating. These changes have not been reflected in the replicas.

I am trying to understand what the best approach is to reclaim this whitespace. Is it feasible to merge the checkpoints on the replicas so that I can compact their drives too? If I do this will Veeam still recognise the replica as is and continue as normal or will I need to remove it from the configuration and modify the job to specify it as being a seeded replica? Or will I have to resort to deleting the entire replica and have Veeam rebuild it from scratch?

Thanks in advance.

Matt

[RomanK]

Hello Matt,

To create snapshot replicas, Veeam Backup & Replication uses Hyper-V VM snapshot capabilities.
Having that, just a block deletion will not affect the replica size.

The simplest way would be just to recreate the replica.
As an alternative, you may try to delete the replica from the VBR configuration and delete all replica snapshots. Then run compact on Hyper-V and map job on that replica back.

Thanks.