New Veeam 5 and fat copies

[virtualwatts]

Hi,

I tested a Veeam copy from one server/datastore to another server/datastore within the same vSphere/ESXi 4.1 cluster last night.

The source of the copy was thin and all manner of extra files like dump and log files were present.
The target only had the core vm files and was FAT.

I don't see any obvious setting to copy thin to thin or preserve format - is thin to FAT expected behavior for Veeam Copy?

Thanks
Rick

[Gostev]

Hi Rick, correct - VM Copy does not support copying thin disks as thin, because it is designed to copy VMs to regular storage (and thin disks cannot exist outside VMFS). For copies between datastores, you should use Replication instead of VM Copy, this does support replicating thin disks as thin. Thanks!

[virtualwatts]

Thanks for the info Gostev,

We're hesitant to use the replication because in our tests it stored the guest in a "veeam backup" folder rather than the guest named folder in the datastore and created multiple copies of the vmdk files (the working file) which is counter to our disk storage optimization. I started with one source 100GB file and ended up with two target 100GB files.

[Gostev]

Under VeeamBackup, there will be guest named folders of your replicas.

There is only one 100GB file on target. The _working file is a descriptor file pointing to the same disks (and it displays the size of disk it points to), however its real size is just a few hundred bytes or so.

[virtualwatts]

Great to know - thanks Gostev.

It is unfortunate that VMware still counts the space as if actually provisioned and that the real size is not accurately reflected in the datastore views.
We're new to Veeam for anything other than backup so this is an adventure.