ESXi moan's HDD is full

[eRJe]

Hi everyone,

These is something I do not understand. I have a 1TB hard disk installed in my ESXi host. I have created one VM disk on it of approximately 960GB, thick provision lazy zeroed. This disk I added to a Linux based server. So now I have nearly 1Tb of backup on a linux environment. The problem is that VMWare is constantly moaning about the disk being full. Only 200 odd MBs are still available.

Also veeam is failing backups to this drive as it receives the msg from the ESXi host.

Is it wrong what I did? Creating one big VM disk on a HDD? How about my other HDD that contain the system disks for each VM? Eventually I will have all space allocated to VM's but the each VM will never use the full disk provided.

Thanks for any advice!

Robbert

[Anjani_Kumar]

As there is Swap file for every VM creates once you create any vm and stored in the datastore and its always been added extra with  your vm size.

would size swap disk according to something like ((total configured VM memory + (#VMs * 128 MiB)) + 20%).

As you Veaam Backup is failiing because There is no space on the Datastore to save the Snapshot created by VEEAM . you need to add more space on you DS or reduce the VM size.

[a_p_]

A 1TB (base10 - marketing size) disk has a real capacity of ~976GB (base2 - real size). With a 960GB virtual hard disk and the swap file, you are most likely already consuming almost all disk space, so there's no more disk space for the snapshot, which not only requires space for changed data blocks, but also for the memory snapshot. You could theoretically reduce the disk space requirement with setting a memory reservation for the VM, but I guess that won't free up enough disk space to safely run the VM with a snapshot during the backup operation.

André

[eRJe]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the responses. But I'm not sure if we are on the same track.

So the 1TB disk, I created one virtual disk, which I then added to an existing Linux server. Partitioned it and formated it just like I would when I add a normal HDD to a normal Linux distribution.

I think, as soon as I made the virtual disk, VMware starts to moan that this DS is full. Regardless how much actual data is written to it. I'm not trying to snapshot anything on the 1TB disk, nor do I try to backup anything on it. I want to create backups to it. Use it as backup storage.

Thanks again,

Robbert

[Anjani_Kumar]

Hi Robert,

Actually as soon you added the virtual disk as Thick partition disk its occupied all the space in to the datastore and Breached the Cirtical level of ESXi host which should be always 95 % of the Datastore.

in you case your esxi will keep moaning until  you extend the DS volume or decrease the disk size..