Virtualization Team

Disk Thin Provisioning & its ease of use in VMware vSphere has been one of the most used features. Although Thin provisioning has allowed customers to avoid allocating space upfront & saved them tons of space, it does not unallocate space when files are deleted from the Virtual Machine, this is due to the way Windows & other operating systems handle file deletion.

In many cases, the customer will create a Thin Provisioned disk with 80GB & use 10 GB out of it. At this time that Virtual Machine will only use 10 GB on the ESX host. Few days later, he might require to use another 50GB for a temporary purpose. Now he will have the Virtual Machine using 60 GB on the ESX host. After few days he go and delete the files that is occupying the temporary 50GB, then he will discover that the virtual machine does not shrink as he delete files from it & he still has a 50GB of wasted space.

Today I have received an e-mail from Veeam, announcing that Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 is fully supporting VMware ESXi including the replication to VMware ESXi host as a target. Below is the body of Veeam announcement e-mail:

======= Veeam Announcement =========

Veeam proudly announces the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 with full support for replication to ESXi hosts!

By moving your virtual infrastructure to ESXi, you can gain the benefits of better security and compliance while still achieving your desired RPOs / RTOs.

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 will provide no-limits support for restoring and replicating to ESXi. You’ll get all the advanced features of Veeam replication, including the ability to fail over to both the latest and earlier points in time, when replicating to ESXi.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the current VMware CEO as well the VMware team as over all. My post is more of a message to the VMware Team & specially the CEO. I believe this below tip can help VMware crush the competition, though they have to study it carefully as it require a brave decision.

Since VMware started & it has been successfully gliding of the nice waves. It has always lead the competition by the quality of its product, as well the essential feature that no one else had. Although no one else had succeeded on over come the reliability & performance of VMware yet, many of the essential features has been replicated in many other Virtualization products in the market. Nonetheless VMware has always been able to innovate new features that customers will desire, customers started thinking that they could wait a year more and get this feature in a cheaper product, which has enough features for their current setup. Yes, I will spell it out many are looking at Hyper-v in this manner.

Before I start with the article, I have to point out this is not a VMware bug. Its the VMware admins doing what they are not suppose to do. VMware ESX 3 & VMware ESX 4 Administration Guides mention clearly that you should not VMotion or Storage vMotion a Virtual machine before disconnecting it from CD Media & ISO images that is only available to the first host or Datastore. Actually it will even warn you when you trying to do that.