Disk Space Issue

[awojtowicz]

i built a new datastore with VM yesterday. all went fine. its a small one. i created a 200GB datastore. i gave 100GB to the C drive and 90GB to D drive. i installed 2008 server and only used 16GB of space on c drive. when my backup ran last night i got this warning....


VMware Backup job: DD630_SQL_Pool_2
Created by TPS\tpsadmin at 1/9/2012 4:52:06 PM. Warning 5 of 5 VMs processed

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 9:00:16 PM
Success 4 Start time 9:00:16 PM Total size 979.0 GB Backup size 37.6 GB DESTINY is no longer processed by this job. Make sure this change is intentional.
Warning 1 End time 9:24:04 PM Data read 125.8 GB Dedupe 3.4x
Error 0 Duration 0:23:47 Transferred 37.6 GB Compression 1.0x

Details
Name Status Start time End time Size Read Transferred Duration Details
DESTINY Warning 9:03:23 PM 9:10:21 PM 190.0 GB 102.0 GB 13.9 GB 0:06:58 Production datastore 'LUN-DESTINY' is getting low on free space (3.2 GB left), and may run out of free disk space completely due to open snapshots.
Athena Success 9:00:50 PM 9:03:20 PM 240.0 GB 1001.0 MB 991.1 MB 0:02:29
PROTEUS Success 9:14:04 PM 9:20:14 PM 210.1 GB 14.6 GB 14.6 GB 0:06:09
MIDAS Success 9:10:25 PM 9:14:00 PM 168.3 GB 3.4 GB 3.3 GB 0:03:35
Apps Success 9:20:17 PM 9:23:57 PM 170.6 GB 4.8 GB 4.8 GB 0:03:39

not sure why its down to 3.2gb?

[Cokovic]

I guess it's because of the snapshot that gets created when your backup job starts.

[awojtowicz]

i dont get it with other vm's. do i need to give it more free space?

[Cokovic]

It's not the VM that is getting out of disk space. It's the LUN where your VM resides on.

DESTINY Warning 9:03:23 PM 9:10:21 PM 190.0 GB 102.0 GB 13.9 GB 0:06:58 Production datastore 'LUN-DESTINY' is getting low on free space (3.2 GB left), and may run out of free disk space completely due to open snapshots

So you should spend your LUN a little bit more disk space.

[dellock6]

You need to extend the LUN or move that VM in a bigger datastore.
Based on your numbers, assuming you created thick disks, you have 200 gb datastore - 100 gb disk1 - 90gb disk2 = 10 Gb free. Subtract from this the swap file that is equal to the ram you gave to the VM, and the space left for snapshots operations is really really low. VMware best practices says 75-80% is a safe usage of a datastore.
Another way would be to do storage vmotion or convertion of that VM, and convert the disks to thin provisioned, since you are using few space. But at the end those two disks can (and will) grow up to the numbers above.

[awojtowicz]

i have an EMC san. is it easy enough of going into unisphere and then the datastore, datastore capacity and increasing it to say 300gb? if i can do this, will i lose any data? do i need to down the VM first?

[dellock6]

It's an online operation. Please check around in Google or VMware community about "VMFS datastore increase" or similar search strings.