Shrink VM Size

[Zew]

I have a VM, let's say it has 500GB of used data, with a 800 GB Thin Disk.

Backups are fine, When you run the Veeam recovery wizard it states the used size of the VM, which will be required to restored.

You then cleanup 300 GBs of data. My assumption here would be that there would be bigger VBK files as the delta is big in terms of CBT. I would also have presumed that the size the VM indicated in the restore wizard would be that of the VM at the time of the backup, picking a different restore point, does seem to change the size of the VM. So then why is it when I pick the latest point (which was done after the data bad been deleted) it still shows roughly 500GB when the VM actually is only using 200GB?

Do I have to zdelete zereod blocks? Hole Punch the VMDK itself before running a backup? What am I missing here...

[Mildur]

Veeam doesn‘t backup deleted blocks with the default settings. Therefore it will not restore this data.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Is it possible, that the data was fragmented over the entire vmdk disk in your case? I don‘t think, that veeam are doing a defragmented restore. Restore the entire vm and then defragment it's virtual disk content.
If there were some valid blocks from not deleted files at the end of the partition, they will be at the end of the partition after the restore. If that‘s the case, the vmdk will not be 200GB with Thin Provision. It will be the entire size from the first block until the last one with content.

[soncscy]

The answer is simple: in-guest deletions have no effect on the thin disk. Blocks for thin disks are never de-allocated: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1005418

If your disk grew to 500 GiB, that is what VMware will return when you poll the disk size from the APIs, even if it's 499.9 GiB of white space. That's why (I presume) VMware has a field in the vCenter UI about the actual storage used vs. the provisioned space.

Because of this, if you have a 500 GiB disk with only 200 GiB of content, then Veeam only knows about a 500 GiB disk; the white-space/deleted items will be compressed/excluded like Fabian wrote.

[Zew]

I believe you are correct Harvey, I wonder if my old blog post would have an affected on the number as shown by Veeam?... mhmmm possible blog post pending?

https://zewwy.ca/index.php/2016/05/28/r ... from-vmdk/