How to reclaim space in VDP

[hirenshinde]

Hi,

I am just worried about the space occupied by VDP Appliance backups at it has crossed 70%. The datastore in VCenter is also 80% filled. Now when I try to delete the old backups , the VDP appliance reclaims the free space but that free space is not getting reflected on datastore. The datastore still showing same used space even after clearing more than 200 GB from VDP Appliance.

Any suggestion please!

Regards,

Hiren Shinde.

[SavkoorSuhas]

Perhaps the VMDKs are thick provisioned ?

[hirenshinde]

yeah...

[SavkoorSuhas]

So if they are thick provisioned, so they will not release any space on the datastore since it is already provisioned to the VM. You will only see space freed up on the VDP appliance.

[hirenshinde]

VM which has VDP installed is having four VMDK's attached.. One of them is thin provisioned which is having the base OS as it's just 200GB disk. Other's are 1 TB each.. So i am wasting so much space... Any way to convert them without data loss!

[vdp4life]

I'm not sure if I'm too late to suggest something but I ran into this in the past. I was lucky enough to have enough space to spin up another smaller VDP instance and have it take over all the backups. You can replicate from old to new so you have no data loss. Once you are done ,you can wipe the OLD VDP.

One thing I learned is you can always grow VDP, but never shrink it.