Copy server without losing thin provisioning

[DaiWebb]

Hi.

Firstly, I apologise if this has already been answered here; I have searched but couldnt't find a solution.

I am trying to copy a virtual machine from one ESXi server to another for disaster recovery. On the source server the disk is thin provisioned (configured for 200GB but only using about 80GB). When I copy the file from the source server to a removable HDD on my workstation the hard disk file is the full 200GB, and remains so when I send it up to the target server (using the datastore browser).

I've tried using Veeam FastSCP, as suggested in some posts here, to copy directly from source server to target server but it does the same, the hard disk ends up using the full 200GB.

Is there a way around this? I have several servers to copy onto a dedicated DR box but need thin provisioning on the disks to utilise the available space.

Any advice/suggestions welcome!

Thanks,

Dai

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

You can use VMware Standalone Converter 4.x.

Or vCenter Server.

Or copy the files, and then reconvert the disk to thin with vmkfstools.

Andre

[DaiWebb]

You can use VMware Standalone Converter 4.x.

Or vCenter Server.

Or copy the files, and then reconvert the disk to thin with vmkfstools.

Andre

Hi Andre.

Thanks for the reply.

I tried using vmkfstools but it didn't work. It said it had converted it to thin but the output file was the same size. This is the command I used:

vmkfstools –i <sourcedisk> -d thin <targetdisk>

Was that correct? I assumed that because it was originally configured as thin, and then expanded during the copy, it couldn't do it.

I've now downloaded and installed VMware converter but at the point of cloning from source to target I get this error:

01:53:10 PM Step 1 : Connecting to VMware Converter Agent on localhost

01:53:10 PM Step 2 : Creating target virtual machine and importing data

01:53:16 PM Configuring parameters for the target virtual machine...

01:53:17 PM Creating target virtual machine...

01:53:20 PM ERROR: Unknown error returned by VMware Converter Agent

(on the target server I see this error in the tasks pane: Invalid configuration for device '8')

The hardware is identical on both physical servers. Any ideas why it might fail? This is the only useful message I can see in the error log:

VmiImportTask::task: Image processing task has failed with MethodFault::Exception: vim.fault.InvalidDeviceSpec

Thanks,

Dave

[DSTAVERT]

I would get some form of shared storage. There are lots of lower end NAS devices that support NFS. You can add an NFS share as a datastore to each of your ESXi hosts. You can then use ghettoVCB or ghettoVCB2 to make clones of your Virtual Machines to the NFS datastore. Each ESXi host sees the same datastore. If you loose one host you can have the clone up and running in a few seconds directly from the NFS datastore.

[DaiWebb]

OK, I seem to have it working now - I tried vmkfstools on another virtual machine and it did clone the drive properly with thin provisioning in place. Thanks.