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ZacTech
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Guidance/Tool Request- Thin Provision, Compression Issues

Post by ZacTech »

The biggest headache I tend to deal with is VMDK and backup size management. I thin provision everything, the vmdk and the SAN volumes. Because of this, I stress to my staff to not put anything on a server unless necessary, such as large installers. When servers get too large, I clean them up. However, because deleting a large amount of data does NOT zero out those sectors, a Veeam backup size does not change.

I then need to zero out the data. I use Precompact for this, works great. The Veeam backup will then compress to a more appropriate size.

However, If I want to reclaim the disk space from a VMware/SAN perspective I need to “defrag” the drives at the Guest OS level. I use defraggler, but sometimes it is time consuming and can’t fully do the job. All that is really needed here is the majority of free space needs to be moved to the end of the disk. Once I accomplish this, then Precompact, Vmkfstools -K ….vmdk, and then vmkfstools –y “datastore”. Some of which requires the guest VM to be off.

What I am hoping for is
1. Perhaps a report from Veeam that compares what the guest VM shows as used space to what Veeam backed up as used space. This report would essential identify VMs that need to have free space zeroed out.
2. A tool that will do nothing more than ensure 90% of free space is contiguously at the end of the drive. Defraggler can’t do the job half the time.

Thoughts, suggestions?
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Guidance/Tool Request- Thin Provision, Compression Issue

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hello Zac,

I believe you can try to look through these reports to achieve what you want: Guest Disk Space Usage and VM Change Rate History

On the other hand, I'm not sure that I understand how would you like to compare used space value from the guest OS and the data that has been backed up during incremental run. The comparison you would like to see makes sense to full backups only or I'm missing some important part here. Can you please elaborate a bit further?

Thank you!
ZacTech
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Re: Guidance/Tool Request- Thin Provision, Compression Issue

Post by ZacTech »

Had a server with a 1.5 TB Thin provision drive. It was filled to about 1.3 TB, and a full Veeam backup would result in a VBK of 1.1 TB with normal recommended compression. We then cleaned up the server and it was filled to about 700GB. Ran another full backup and it was around 1TB! Then ran precompact, which zeros out "empty" sectors and the backup went to 600GB.

I guess I was saying it would be of great value to have the guest total disk usage show up on the backup report and if the backup size exceeds that then flag as a warning.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Guidance/Tool Request- Thin Provision, Compression Issue

Post by Vitaliy S. »

ZacTech wrote:Had a server with a 1.5 TB Thin provision drive. It was filled to about 1.3 TB, and a full Veeam backup would result in a VBK of 1.1 TB with normal recommended compression. We then cleaned up the server and it was filled to about 700GB. Ran another full backup and it was around 1TB! Then ran precompact, which zeros out "empty" sectors and the backup went to 600GB.
Yes, I understand that, but what about incremental runs? How often do you run full backups?

Trying to elaborate it a bit more from my side - would like to compare VM backup size with the actual Guest OS disk usage? If this is the case, then you can take a look at this report as well > Veeam Backup Files Growth

BTW, how many VMs do you have per job?
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