Virtual disk for SWG VE grows to consume all free space on the ESX or ESXi server

Products

• Web Gateway

Issue/Introduction

Virtual disk for Symantec Web Gateway (SWG) Virtual Edition (VE) grows to consume all free space on the ESX or ESXi server.

Cause

Factors which may lead SWG VE to contribute to the exhaustion of disk space on the host operating system of VMWare ESX/ESXi server:

• Symantec builds the .ova template for SWG using thick disk provisioning and sets the provisioned disk to 90GB.
   
• Although SWG builds the .vmdk in such a way that SWG appliance can access 90GB of hard drive, the VM for SWG VE may consume additional storage above the provisioned 90.0GB on the ESX server if Snapshots are used.
   
• VMWare ESXi by default permits any given VM to use a maximum of 256.0GB or the current available free hard drive space on the ESX server. If the ESX server does not have enough free hard drive space left to execute a disk write within but the disk write would otherwise fall within the disk quota allocated for the VM for SWG VE, the ESX server will attempt to perform the write, fail, then reboot to recover.
   
• Unless the VM is in a fully stopped state, the ESX or ESXi server will maintain a file with a name similar to Name_of_VM_Image.vmss with a size in GB roughly the same as the RAM resources allocated to the VM. For more information regarding auxiliary files that may add to the total disk footprint of a running VM, please see the following documentation from VMWare:
  
  Title: VMWare.com: What Files Make Up a Virtual Machine?
  URL: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_learning_files_in_a_vm.html

 

Resolution

To partially workaround this behavior,do one or more of the following:

• Deploy SWG VE within a dedicated ESX/ESXi server with more than 256.0GB free storage.
• Delete all snapshots for the VM for SWG VE and avoid creating any more.