File Level Recovery

[fredbloggs]

I notice in the readme (yes I read it) that you say FLR is not available in thin provisioned disks. Is this a feature you're thinking about adding in the future? would be really nice.

Also, are you thinking abuot adding support for Hyper-V or XenServer?

thanks

mark

[Gostev]

Hello, we will investigate the possibility to add FLR to thin-provisioned disks. It has not been a priority for us since vast majority of customers are using flat disks. Main reason is that most significant functionality brought by virtualization (HA, DRS, Fault Tolerance, DPM) requires flat disks (and this requirement remains unchanged in vSphere).

And yes, we most definitely have plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer in the next 12-18 months - when the customer demand for these solutions will increase, and will represent a measurable market share.

Thanks!

[fredbloggs]

Hi Gostev,

We're using thin provisioned disks and still get to utilise the benefits of HA, DRS, VMotion, haven't tested DPM.

We are however using an NFS datastore and thin provisioning is turned on by default.

Thanks

Mark

[Gostev]

Hello Mark, this is strange - I could not even find the option to make disk thin-provisioned when creating VM in the current Virtual Center version. While in vSphere RC, I can see this option when creating the virtual machine, but selecting it specifically disables another adjacent checkbox that allows for support of clusterting technologies.

[mdornfeld]

I can't speak for Mark, but I think he is refering to SAN level Thin Provisioning, not VMware level Thin Provisioning.

Does FLR not work with SAN level thin provisioning?

[Gostev]

Hello, yes it should work just fine. Basically all what matter is that actual virtual machine is configured to use flat VMDK files (and tbh I could not find a way to create it differently). It does not matter how these files are stored on physical storage level (whether it is storage device with thin provisioning, hardware deduplication and so on). All what matter is that they are represented as flat files on the logical level - then VMDKs would be stored in backup file in the flat form as well (although compressed and deduped).

[fredbloggs]

Yes thanks, that's what I meant. Good to know that FLR will be possible in our environment.

Mark