Space Reclaimer for NetApp SnapDrive

SnapDrive for Windows 6.3, which was released last year, introduced support for VMDKs on NFS & VMFS Datastores

A couple of quick notes, you need Data ONTAP 7.3.4 or later to use block reclamation with SnapDrive for VMDKs.

You need to have VSC 2.0.1 or later installed, with the Backup and Recovery feature, and also SnapDrive (within the VM) must have network connectivity to the VSC (port 8043, by default) as well as Virtual Center.

Also, SnapDrive cannot create VMDKs for you, in the way it can create RDM LUNs. Instead, you have to create VMDKs the old fashioned way, but once they’re attached to the VM, SnapDrive will be able to manage them.

Okay, so I’ve got a VMDK (my C: Drive), which is in an NFS Datastore.

I copied 5GB worth of Data into the C: drive, then deleted it. This left my VMDK at 10GB in size.

So, Windows took up about 5GB, and the data (which is now deleted), was about 5GB – so let’s kick off space reclamation and see how much space I get back.

Right click on the VMDK, and select “Start Space Reclaimer”.

It will do a quick check, to see if it actually can reclaim any space for you.

The confirmation box reckons I get reclaim up to 3GB? Hmm, I was hoping for a bit more than that. Well, let’s run it anyway and see how well it does.

It’s worth noting the warning on here – while the VSC requires VMs to be shutdown in order to reclaim space, SnapDrive runs space reclamation while the VM is powered up – but, it will take a backseat to any actual I/O that’s going on, so you might want to run it in a low usage period.

 

So, I clicked okay, and it kicked off space reclamation – and it even gives me a nice little progress bar.

In my lab, it took about 3 minutes, and when it was done, it had shrunk my VMDK down to 5.6 GB.

 

So it was just being modest earlier when it said I could free up to 3GB!

In total, it has reclaimed 5.2GB – which is actually a little more than the data I copied in and deleted to start with!