Instant Recover VM to Production via Clone using vSphere

[Rick1971]

I am running Veeam Backup and Replication and our Production VM went down and currently running Instant Recovery VM directly off NAS.  My Datastore is has only 1.34TB left and the VM I need to bring back on the Host Production is 1.7TB.  I did some housecleaning but still not enough free space on the datastore.  So, I was going to thin Clone the VM that is running directly off the Backup NAS so I can change the size of the VM and partitions in order to fit on the 1.34TB free space.  The option is there to Clone from vSphere, however since I used Veeam's Instant Recovery from a previous backup state, I wanted to know if this has been done before and successful.  I suspect it should work out fine, but wanted some input from anyone who has done this.

Alternatively I could just delete the downed VM and migrate the IR to Production, but sometimes it is a good idea to keep both in place in order to access any files from the downed vm to the migrated vm, if needed.

Thanks in advance for any input.

[ldelloca]

Hi Rick,

full disclosure first, I work for Veeam.

If you have storage vmotion, you can change the thick/thin disk configuration while you run the svmotion itself, so if the actual state of the restore VM is thick, it will be shrinked to thin thus saving space.

Otherwise, you can run an additional backup of the broken VM before deleting it, even using VeeamZIP so the backup is out of the scheduled retention. You would be able then to access any file of the old VM from this backup.

Luca.

[vThinkBeyondVM]

If you use storage vMotion, your problem would be solved.