topic Re: defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore in Network and Storage Protocols

defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore

mdvillanueva — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:32:13 GMT

Hi Experts,

We mount multiple NFS datastores from Netapp to our VM environment. I am noticing that our smvi snapshot is always big. I know that most of these vm instance have defragmentation running as a scheduled task (legacy task from when they are still physical servers) I know it is not advisable to defragment a LUN, is it the same with VMs inside an NFS datastore?

Thanks,

Maico

Re: defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore

ekashpureff — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:09:57 GMT

Maico -

It is very likely the defrags are causing your large rate of change.

The same does hold true for NFS as for VMFS on a LUN ...

I hope this answer has been meaningful to you !

At your service,

Eugene Kashpureff

Re: defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore

mdvillanueva — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:31:28 GMT

Eugene thanks for the info. I am struggling to find a Netapp document that pertains to this. Do you know of one?

Maico

Re: defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore

radek_kubka — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:34:11 GMT

Hi Maico,

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf, p83:

"VMs stored on NetApp storage arrays should not use disk defragmentation utilities because the WAFL file system is designed to optimally place and access data at a level below the guest operating system (GOS) file system."

Regards,

Radek