Hello there,
I am searching some articles, but since I found different information regarding this topic, I decided to started my own thread to check if someone else faced a similar issue.
For some political and business choices that I can't explain any further, we have a VM running on ESX 6.0 Update 1 that has a 8TB VMDK. We're planning to take a complete VM backup using HP Data Protector, but me question is: is that allowed? Can I take a snapshot (which is what the DP is doing in the background) of disks that large? Could this action possibly leads to a VMDK corruption or problems of any sort? And, if not, is there a way to estimate the snapshot size that this VM needs to allocate on the LUN to create the backup (I mean, i know that this is different for each type of VM, but is there a formula or a way to measure and estimate this?)
Thanks!
Welcome to the Community,
VMware supports virtual disks with up to 62TB, so you should basically not have any issues with doing a snapshot based backup.
There's unfortunately no way to calculate the snapshot size. The required (temporary) disk space for the snapshot, depends on the guest OS changes. A snapshot/delta .vmdk file starts with a small size (a few MB), and stores data blocks which are written while the snapshot exists.
With the 2TB (20%) free disk space, you should be on the safe side unless the data change rate is extremely high on this server.
André
Thanks, Andre.
Really appreciate the help!