Windows NFS and thin provision of copies/replicas

[mckenzieaj]

Up front, my ultimate goal is to get *thin* copies of VMs on to external (ntfs) disks as part of my DR strategy. Thick copies are a horrible answer in my case.

My problem is twofold and related...

I am running windows 2008r2 storage server on a Dell device that has an NFS store mounted, and I am finding that
a) if I use a vmcopy job from the VMware host direct to external drive, the disks are expanded to thick (I think this is flagged as expected in another post)
b) If I use Veeam to create a replica from the host to the windows NFS share, it is also thick provisioned.
c) If I create a new VM on the NFS share inside vSphere, the thin provision options are greyed out (but thin is highlighted) but the disk seems to come out thick in both the VM summary (used/not-share storage) and on the disk.

Some of this is probably a bit out of scope of Veeam directly, but if anyone can point me in the good direction it would be appreciated!

Thanks
Andrew

[dellock6]

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1005418

On NFS vSphere always creates thin disks and you cannot choose otherwise, that's why you see thin option greyed out but highlighted.

Luca.

[mckenzieaj]

Thanks, that is what I have read as well...

but all mine are going down as thick on to the NFS datastore i.e. full size. This is how it is reported in vcenter sizing and the actual vmdk size itself.

and I have not found a reason why yet. Not sure if windows 2008 r2 based NFS is not compatible or else I might be missing a step somewhere (but it seems pretty basic).


Hence my question!

[dellock6]

If you look at VMware HCL, Microsoft is not listed among the supported storage vendor.
I never even tried to use MS NFS as a shared storage for ESXi, so I really do not know if it can be usable, and what results you can get from it.

Luca.

[Vitaliy S.]

my ultimate goal is to get *thin* copies of VMs on to external (ntfs) disks as part of my DR strategy.

It is not possible to store thin disks on NTFS file system, all disks will be converted to thick automatically. If you want to have copies of your VMs as a part of the DR strategy, I would suggest using VeeamZIP jobs to create a backup file of your VMs (this will allow you to preserve thin provisioning).

[mckenzieaj]

Hi V,

Thanks, I have not come up to speed with recent developments! I can see that veeamzip is free, but also comes with v6.5.

Can veeamzip be **scheduled** as part of the full enterprise product, or is it only an ad hoc tool.

If only ad hoc in the inteface, can it be run command line?

If either one can work, I have an answer!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Andrew,

Yes, you can use PowerShell scripts and Windows Task Scheduler to trigger VeeamZIP jobs on a desired schedule.

Thanks!

[mckenzieaj]

or...... ....

If I do indivdual vm standard .vbk backups with only 1 point kept, is this effectively the same as doing a veeamzip? and could be used for an ad hoc restore using the expand utility if needed?

[foggy]

It is in fact much more effective, since backup jobs are incremental (VeeamZIP - is not).