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halemeister
Contributor
Contributor

vranger question

I am getting ready to setup vranger on a server to backup my vms on ESX 3.5....One of my VMs has 2 hard drives, one is 50GB and the other is 400GB. My question is, how big of a drive do I need in my vranger pc that I am backing this vm up to? I won't need 450GB right? I think I am only using 100GB of the drive so does vranger only need space for what you are using on those drives?

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

This is really a question for the Vizioncore support forums. I have found however that it compresses things down quite far. If there is no data on the drives then they should compress pretty far. However, I always make sure I have enough space for all my VMs just in case they are full of data. Less worrying to do.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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bitsorbytes
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Not sure if you have used vranger, cause you would have the answer already.

vranger gui is installed on a windows machine, this then talks to the esx servers and vc server.

When a job starts, it has agents start on the source esx server, that talk to the dest esx server. It copies the data between esx servers over the LAN (or WAN).

When it starts a job, it takes a snapshot of the machine, does a copy/delta and then comits the snapshot when its completed.

So the space needed would be 450gb at the other end, plus some headroom on the source server for the snapshot and a little on the dest, just to be safe.

Andrew

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java_cat33
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

No the compression ratio is very good with vranger - if you only have 100 GB of data in use on a vol and it's backed up with vranger you will require less than 100GB for backing up this vol in most cases. For example - the backup size of the vol maybe 70GB for example.

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rpartmann
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi,

well mostly vRanger need about that space what is usen inside the VM which is then compressed.

You should tick the option "dont check free space" or similar if you have only used lets say 120gig of 450gig of your vm and 300gig on vranger free.

hth,

Reinhard.

ps: Award points if you find answers helpful. Thanks.

ps: Award points if you find answers helpful. Thanks.
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

The compression rate (and the size of the resulting backup) depends on the data on the guest filesystem.

Text files can be highly compressed. Binary data (executables, mp3s, compressed graphics for example) not so much. I like to arbitrarily and imprecisely toss "50 percent" around there in most cases.

Early VC backup products used a tar/gzip format, they switched to a slightly basta**ized LZOP format almost two years ago. This was to save CPU overhead during compression operations .. not really to achieve greater compression ratios... VC was the first to come up with that solution, it has been adopted by other products since then.

Anyway. With the aforementioned caveats, a 20 gig vm with 7 gigs of disk space used .. would have a resulting archive of about 3.5 gigs +/- in most cases.

(This is based on used space, not allocated space. You say you're using 100GB of disk space so in short, let's say the answer to your question, is that the backup's 50 gigs, give or take ..)

Still seems to be a more or less accurate rule of thumb with newer releases... On one of my demo servers (Zimbra) .. 5.7 gigs of the disk is in use, and the resulting LZOP archive is 2.9 gigs.

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