defragmentation of VM instance in NFS datastore

[mdvillanueva]

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

[ekashpureff]

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

[mdvillanueva]

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

Maico

[radek_kubka]

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