SUMMARY
The purpose of this article is to answer the question "What is the expected size of VMware full backups of VMware VMs that reside on NFS datastores?".
ISSUE
What is the expected size of VMware full backups of VMware VMs that reside on NFS datastores?
RESOLUTION
The expected size of a VMware full backup of a VMware VM that resides on NFS datastores is the sum of the provisioned size of the virtual hard disks.
Note:
- The described behavior is _not_ a defect. It is the expected behavior of the VMware backup using their API and VDDK.
- Unitrends' appliances do use compression and deduplication (inline or post-process, depending on appliance model) to provide data reduction, synonymous with space savings, to increase retention.
- The described behavior will also cause the sum protected capacity to be higher, which may trigger some appliance alerts regarding protected capacity, etc., because these are using the native size of the backup (equates to the sum provisioned size of the VMs disks) for the relevant VMs.