Andy Kurth created VCL-718:
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Summary: Add optional automatic execution of sdelete.exe to reduce
vmdk size
Key: VCL-718
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/VCL-718
Project: VCL
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: vcld (backend)
Reporter: Andy Kurth
Fix For: 2.4
VMware .vmdk files stored thin will grow as data is written to the VM's hard
drive. When data is deleted from the VM, the size of the .vmdk remains the
same. Data is not reclaimed. Example, start with a 15GB .vmdk and load a VM.
Write 10GB to the VM's hard drive and delete this data. Save the image. The
size of the new image .vmdk will be ~ 25GB.
There is a new feature with vmfs5 which allows data to be reclaimed but I've
read where this may cause performance degradation.
The size of the .vmdk can be reduced by running 'sdelete.exe -z' on the VM
before an image is captured. This writes 0's to all of the empty disk space.
At this point, the size of the .vmdk is equal to the total disk size (no longer
thin).
After shutting down the VM, vmkfstools -K (punchzeros) can be run to reclaim
all empty disk space. I'm not exactly sure what this does but the result in
the example above would be a 15GB .vmdk.
We could add a tools/Windows/Utilities/sdelete directory. The sdelete.exe
utility would have to be downloaded and saved in this directory on the
management node. The pre_capture code would check if sdelete.exe exists and
run it after deleting the pagefile and rebooting. A flag would be set if
sdelete.exe was run and vmkfstools -K would be run if true.
I'm not sure if there's an equivalent function using the vSphere SDK. It would
need to be researched.
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