vSphere Thin Provisioning Support

[typ]

Will the new version of Veeam support thin provisioned disks? I noticed in the current 3.0.1 build (I know it's not supported) that it takes a drive of 40GB that's thin provisioned to an actual 6GB still wants to write 40GB of data in backup and/or replication. Just wanted to know if Veeam will recognize the provisioning and write just the necessary 6GB to disk.

Much appreciated,

Patrick C.

[Gostev]

Patrick, this behavior remains unchanged in Veeam Backup 3.1. Processing thin-provisioned disks without expanding them to flat disks is a part of Veeam Backup 4.0 release that also relies on new vSphere APIs for disaster recovery (also known as vStorage API). Thank you.

[typoman]

I have a Veeam B&R 4.0 installation and I am replicating a couple VM's from one ESX4 host to another. The VM's (vHardware v7) have thin provisioned disks, but are still writing thick disks on the destination host. Isn't Veeam supposed to be writing thin disks on the destination host?

[Gostev]

Hello, you are observing the expected behavior, and this is documented in the Release Notes for v4. Support for replicating thin disks as thin is scheduled for version 4.5 in Q1 2010. Currently, thin-provisioned disks are only supported for backup and restore.

Thank you for reusing the existing thread

[typoman]

Is thin-to-thin replication part of the current release yet?

[Gostev]

No, current release is 4.1.1 and it does not support thin-to-thin replication. This feature is part of 5.0 release (we have decided to skip 4.5 mentioned above, and are going straight for 5.0).