Inefficient Snapshot disk space usage?

ralphw · Tue Feb 19, 2013 7:36 pm

Hello, I'm running StarWind 5.8 on Windows 2008 R2 and I've got some issues with Starwind unnecessarily chewing up disk space when it relates to snapshots...

Basically what I've got is a StarWind server serving a single VMware host via a 1tb CDP device.

My disk space usage according to VMware is a little over 277gb used. See screenshot here:

: Screenshot1; SS1.jpg (12.55 KiB) Viewed 4208 times

The CDP device is on my storage server on the "D" drive. It is the only thing on that volume, however it's consuming more than twice the disk space that I'm seeing in my VMware host. See screenshot here:

: Screenshot3; SS3.jpg (55.6 KiB) Viewed 4208 times

And lastly the files StarWind is using for this device:

: Screenshot4; SS4.jpg (90.9 KiB) Viewed 4209 times

When I did some looking into this, I found that there were several snapshots created in the CDP device. I don't recall ever doing this, but they were there for some reason even though the device is not set up to do any kind of automatic snapshots. So I don't know what's up with that either...

But my main concern is that even though I have deleted the snapshots, the disk space is not returned so now I've got a situation where my VMware host thinks it has more storage space than it actually does and I'm concerned that eventually it will hit a wall and make things very bad for me.

How can I get StarWind to release that space back to me? It's currently holding about 300gb hostage on my system.

Thu Feb 21, 2013 12:20 pm

Hi!

I`ll recommend you to take a closer look at the following topics:
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t2599.html
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t2694.html
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/ ... t1466.html

I hope they will help you to solve your issue.

Please keep us updated.

ralphw · Fri Mar 01, 2013 4:06 pm

I guess I'm still a little bit confused... In those threads, where does it talk about reclaiming the extra disk space that is being eaten up? Am I missing it?

Since my post, I have had a couple of developments. I had a network issue that caused one of the mpio links to go down. In the process of troubleshooting/correcting the problem, the Starwind server was rebooted a couple of times. To follow up on the issue with this thread, I was looking at the file structure again and I noticed that 3 more snapshots were creating during the times when I was rebooting the server. I know I didn't make those snapshots, so I'm guessing the system is automatically creating them for some reason. When does the system create snapshots on its own...when it reboots?

Instead of deleting the snapshots this time, I merged them all into 1 and then deleted the last one. I was hoping that this would maybe reclaim some disk space because of the directions you were pointing me too on your links.

But that didn't save me any space at all. What can I do to prevent my almost 300gb of data from using almost 600gb of actual disk space?

Tue Mar 05, 2013 11:46 am

I guess the snapshots are creating because device was configure to auto-create snapshots (it is taking once per 30 minutes by default).

In most of threads it is mentioned that there was a lot of snapshot related files, which were taking space. In the second thread you can see that problem was solved by creating the linked clone, have you tried to follow that step?

Also, I`m not sure if I understood what exactly consumes that space if you have deleted the files, would you please clarify that?

ralphw · Wed Mar 27, 2013 7:39 pm

Well, that explains the snapshot creation. Is there some way to disable them? I like the idea of having snapshots, but I want to control when they are made so that I can avoid this situation in the future. It looks like when I create a new device the checkbox is unchecked...does it enable the snapshots anyway?

I haven't deleted any files. I have only deleted snapshots within the starwind management console. I haven't touched the file structure on the disk because I wouldn't know where to begin with that.

I'm still not understanding what you're asking me to do. If I create a linked clone, wouldn't I then be making a new disk that requires the old one to still be present? Wouldn't I then just be adding more disk usage since I can't get rid of the old disk?

I guess my end goal is to have my actual disk usage to be at or close to the usage that my VMware server sees and to not have to run into this problem in the future. My fear is that my VMware usage will grow and because VMware thinks that it has a lot more space than what is physically available on my Starwind server and the system will crash. As you can see in my screen shots, VMware thinks it has close to 750gb available when the available free space on the Starwind server is less than that.

It looks like I'm needing to clone the current disk to something else, remove the old disk and start using the new one for my target. If that's correct can you provide me the steps to be able to do that? Or tell me what I need to know to get to where I want to be?

Fri Mar 29, 2013 2:47 pm

Well, that explains the snapshot creation. Is there some way to disable them?

I`m afraid it can be done only by re-creating of all entire device.

It looks like when I create a new device the checkbox is unchecked...does it enable the snapshots anyway?

If something is unchecked or not checked in it will not be enabled and will not work.

If I create a linked clone

I`m really sorry, Ive mixed up a little bit - I`ve ment the full clone.

It looks like I'm needing to clone the current disk to something else, remove the old disk and start using the new one for my target. If that's correct can you provide me the steps to be able to do that? Or tell me what I need to know to get to where I want to be?

Correct. Basically clone will create another virtual disk that will be independent from the one that it was created off.