backing up thin VMs

[KCSCsupport]

Using Backup Exec 2010 with all updates.  I am backing up several VMs using Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure.  One day, two of my VMs just started backing up as the provisioned size instead of the used space. What's the deal? The two VMDK files are 7GB and 8GB, but are backing up as 32GB (virtual partition size). Help

[harsi]

I have to slightly correct my observations.

Three of five machines are backed up with provisioned space and two are backed up with used space.

All are located on the same VMFS datastore, all machines have only thin provisioned disks, all machines run Windows 2008 R2 with exacly same software and patchlevel (installed completely unattended) and none of the machines has a snapshot before starting backup.

An suggestions how to track down that problem?

Cheers.

[harsi]

I was able to fix the probelm by the follwoing procedure:

1.) Download srcd.iso from www.sysresccd.org

2.) Boot the problematic VM from CD (srcd.iso)

3.) start partimage from CD and take an image from the problematic partition.

4.) Delete the problematc VM and it's VMDKs

5.) Recreate VM

6.) Boot the new VM from CD (srcd.iso)

7.) start partimage from CD and restore the image previously taken.

This helped for all machines which were affected by the problem but still I have no clue what is the initial cause.

[KCSCsupport · Accepted solution]

this seems to be the only way to get it to backup as thin again. i used ghost, but the procedure was mostly the same. here's what i did.

1) image the VM
2) delete the vmdk
3) delete virtual hard drive from VM config
4) add new hard drive in VM config
5) restore image to blank virtual hard drive.