[jira] [Updated] (VCL-718) Add optional automatic execution of sdelete.exe to reduce vmdk size

["Aaron Peeler (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

     [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/VCL-718?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]

Aaron Peeler updated VCL-718:
-----------------------------
    Fix Version/s:     (was: 2.4)
                   2.5

> 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: 2.5
>
>
> 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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