reduce 1st run backup time and size with sdelete v09.19.12.txt

author: Randy J. Cress date:
This should be the first in a few very interesting findings while trying to reduce backup windows and disk/tape storage requirements for a fully virtualized environment in vSphere 4.0 with Veeam 4.1.

Ok, I figured this would have some impact after reading about zeroing free space on an NTFS volume..

Single server test on a VM (HW ver 7) that is 3 years old:
(bound to be alot of deleted data from windows updates and software upgrades)

ServerA - 8GB C:, 10GB E: - 18GB Total Provisioned Space

Pre-zeroing free space: Backup Time: 5:03, Total .vbk size: 5,852,222 KB
Post-zeroing free space: Backup Time: 4:23, Total .vbk size: 4,139,682 KB

Full 1st run backup time savings: 13% (40 seconds)
Full 1st run backup disk space savings: 29% (1,712,540 KB)

Two unique jobs were created in Veeam using optimal compression, VSS, and Change Block Tracking (CBT) was not turned on.

The tool used to zero the free space was the Systernals: SDelete from 2005!
("sdelete -c c:" then sdelete -c e:")
It took a couple of minutes to run inside the VM, very easy..'

I wanted to run this on one VM to highlight the potential savings (and to get quick results) in order to see how this would scale to hundreds of VMs.

If you can save ~25% on your first run backups, think of the money you could save with backup solutions that charge based on backend storage used.. EMC Avamar comes to mind.

This is pure speculation and it would be very difficult to predict. Factors include length of VM service and number of updates and software upgrades performed. On database servers that export to flat files you may have very large deleted files, etc..

So, before you jump on a solution, take a few minutes to realize that there is a bunch of blocks used by your VMs that can be zeroed and compressed very nicely saving you time, disk space and money.
tags:

Comments

Network Monitoring Software said…
So why did you choose not to turn on Change Block Tracking?
4/03/2011 1:59 PM
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