Do you turn off drive optimization in Windows VMs?

[HendersonD]

I had a situation where

• Veeam backup job was running and it creates snapshot on a VM
• Windows disk optimization ran while the snapshot was present
• The snapshot was removed
• The ESXi datastore completely filled up

This is a known combination of events that causes this, VMware Knowledge Base

One way to resolve this is to turn off automatic disk optimization in Windows. Do you do this?

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

You can disable it:

How to Disable Automatic Drive Optimization / Defrag in Windows 10 | Password Recovery

or schedule it in less critical moments:

How to disable automatic drive optimization in Windows 10 - gHacks Tech News

ARomeo

[continuum]

• Veeam backup job was running and it creates snapshot on a VM
• Windows disk optimization ran while the snapshot was present

Bad idea - as soon as you use snapshots any defragmentation tools running inside the guest will expand the virtual disks.

[HendersonD]

Correct but Veeam is the most popular VM backup software and it is snapshot based