Using Veeam to reclaim space from thin provisioned vmdk

[exposystems]

This is just an inquiry on whether its possible to find some way to backup or replicate with Veeam a CENTOS thin provisioned virtual machine and reclaim space at the same time without downtime.
Generally speaking from what I have found online the idea is to zero out the linux free space but that would inflate to the full size and its over-provisioned 1TB and the datastore is 600 and then storage vmotion to a datastore with different block size.
Is there a way from your experience that Veeam could help us do something like this with the least dispuption?
Thanks in advance.
George

[veremin]

Is there a way from your experience that Veeam could help us do something like this with the least dispuption?

Hi, George,

Can you elaborate on that? You mean you want to make VB&R do both reclaim the free space and backup VM? Besides using pre-job scripts, I can't think of a way you can archive that goal.

Thanks.

[dellock6]

There are some tools on linux too that are the equivalent to windows sdelete, but your best chance is to use dd (search on Google for "dd zero free space").
You can zero only the free space without having to inflate the entire disk, like sdelete does.
As in windows, expect a bigger incremental backup after this operation.

[exposystems]

thanks a lot I can confirm that by adding zeros and Veeam replicating to a datastore with different block size the space was reclaimed.The linux engineer however inflated the whole disk so I have to ask him if he can find a way he can write zeros in only the free space inside linux and not vmfs.Thanks again to both and delock if you have a link to help the linux administrator on that procedure let me now.

[dellock6]

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#shrinkimg

Luca.