I'm not sure if this is related to me starting to use SureBackup jobs or not. But I'm willing to hear any suggestions on help. I don't think it due to me installing Update 5.5u3 on my vCenter server, since it seemed to have started to exponentially grow after the fact, in my list of backups it shows as follows:
1) Active full 11/7/15 - VM size 45.9 Gigs
2) Increment 18/07/15 - VM size 45.9 Gigs
3) Increment 25/07/15 - VM size 38.8 Gigs ( I probably cleaned up some binaries or something when disc space warning)
4) Increment 01/08/15 - VM size 38.8 Gigs
5) Increment 08/08/15 - VM size 38.8 Gigs
6) Increment 18/08/15 - VM size 38.8 Gigs (As one can see the DB isn't growing and the VM is stable)
7) Increment 05/09/15 - VM size 39.6 Gigs (At this time it appears to start growing Sep 5th)
Increment 12/09/15 - VM size 42.6 Gigs (Still growing....)9) Increment 19/09/15 - VM size 42.6 Gigs (Still haven't even got my Trial key for sure backup, so makes me believe that's can't be the case)
10) Increment 26/09/15 - VM size 44.3 Gigs (started playing with sureback up a bit)
11) Increment 03/10/15 - VM size 45.7 Gigs (3 days before 5.5u3 patch)
12) Increment 10/10/15 - VM size 54.3 GB (a really big jump in one week ( I played around the most during this time))
13) Increment 17/10/15 - VM size 58.2 GB (another big jump, I'm assuming the big jumps might have been due to the Surebackup jobs, but I couldn't verify that)
That's my last good backup cause after that vCenter server had reached its max DB size at this point. We have been fighting (the DBA and myself) to get this server back online, we finally managed to get it back up in running (Thanks to Veeam, even though it couldnt' connect to our vCenter I was still easily able to recover guest files or even the VM files if needed. Love Veeam) by restoring the DB files from before it had reached its limit, sadly I had to take the Oct 3 since the DB's from before that were on 5.5u2 and the Veeam service didn't like the DB version being different on them. This I'm assuming is cause the 5.5u3 update I'm guessing updated the SQL service instance as well.
Anyway, My colleague is now running the stored procedure that is provided with the vCenter server DB's to purge task n events. We also checked the vCEnter server log settings and checked them off to clear logs older than 60 days (180 is the limit and turns out was not enabled by default).
Can anyone here provide any thoughts as to what might have happened? I guess at this point I simply have to monitor the DB for a while to ensure there isn't exponential growth on the DB.
Additional Notes: SQL express, 3 hosts, maybe 30 VM's (totally under the requirements for running vCenter on SQL express) but feel maybe the surebackup jobs where adding a lot of additional tasks n events and data performance?