Thin Restore of VMDK file?

[AndyR]

Just tried doing a test restore of one of my test VMs have hit a bit of snag.

The VM in question is RHEL 5.4 and has 2 virtual disks assigned. 20gb for boot and a 50gb for data, both thin provisioned. The 50gb drive is the one I am trying to restore so as a test I deleted the 50gb disk from the datastore with a plan to restore it (its just a test vm I setup for this purpose). Now the 50gb is thin provisioned but actual size of the VMDK file is only 1.2gb in size.

So I tried doing a VM Files restore of just the second disk VMDK, but it restores a thick version which i dont have the space for. I don't want to restore the whole VM so is there anyway to do a thin restore of a VMDK file?

Thanks,

Andy

[AndyR]

I noticed I can do a thin restore but ONLY if I restore the whole VM. This works fine, and comes back as I would expect, but I dont want to restore the whole VM as I have some VMs where just a single VMDK disk restore would be required, so this is what we need to be able to thin restore just a single VMDK from a VM.

Any ideas?

Thx.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Andy,

That's correct. Provided that you choose to restore individual VM files, all your virtual disks will be restored as thick ones, the only way to keep them thin is to restore entire VM to VMFS volume. I agree that it might be not convenient, but this is the only workaround for now.

[Gostev]

Thin disks have two main limitations. They cannot exist anywhere but on VMFS volume, and they must be attached to VM (required parameter of API call that creates thin disk). VM Files restore wizard does not know what VM the disk is restored to, so it can only restore disk as thick. But this sounds like good feature request, let me log this for the future release. We should still be able to keep disk as thin when restoring to VMFS.

[AndyR]

That's correct. Provided that you choose to restore individual VM files, all your virtual disks will be restored as thick ones, the only way to keep them thin is to restore entire VM to VMFS volume. I agree that it might be not convenient, but this is the only workaround for now.

Thanks, bit a of a pain then if you have a VM with multiple drives and only need to restore one drive from a given day. Oh well, bit a show stopper for me then

Thin disks have two main limitations. They cannot exist anywhere but on VMFS volume, and they must be attached to VM (required parameter of API call that creates thin disk). VM Files restore wizard does not know what VM the disk is restored to, so it can only restore disk as thick. But this sounds like good feature request, let me log this for the future release.

Thanks Gostev, would be great if you can include this in a future release as at present I don't think we can use Veeam as this is a big stumbling block for us. EG, at the minute on the VMs I need to backup has 3 virtual disks, all thin, 2 of which are 20gb thin with 3-4gb data each (so not a major issue), but the other is a 512gb disk with 100gb data in. If I need to restore this drive, and I would as its a db testing server, I'd instantly use up the full 512gb of space, so negating the use of thin disks in this instance. If this could be in a future version it would be great, until then, I'll have to find some other way to backup this VM