Using Quick Migration to re-thin VMDK

[sconley]

Will the Quick Migration functionality of Backup and Replication effectively re-thin a VMs VMDK? We have several VMs that have become bloated, and have a storage migration project coming up. Given this I was curious if we could use quick migration instead of another method (Storage vMotion, etc.) which would not re-thin the disk to accomplish this.

[PTide]

Hi,

First of all it's not clear from your question whether you want to make the disk thin or not? Quick Migartion allows you to choose the relocated disk type (it uses thin disk by default).

Thanks

[sconley]

Hi,

First of all it's not clear from your question whether you want to make the disk thin or not? Quick Migartion allows you to choose the relocated disk type (it uses thin disk by default).

Thanks

The disk is already thin provisioned. However, the disk has grown unnecessarily because we had out of control shadow copies at one point, so the disk has effectively become thick provisioned with alot of white space. I was wondering if I could essentially shrink the underlying VMDK easily using quick migration rather than using alternative methods (i.e. sdelete). So the question is, will quick migration skip this white space?

[PTide]

Quick Migration won't skip white spaces as it's not aware of what's going on inside the guest. If it's a Windows VM then you can create replication job and utilize the Bitlooker to skip empty blocks.

[sconley]

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the info.