VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager placeholder virtual machines and datastores show high provisioned space

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

The provisioned disk space utilization for placeholder virtual machines on the Recovery site in a VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM) deployment appears very high, possibly larger than the capacity of the datastore.

Environment

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.1.x

Resolution

The placeholder virtual machines on the Recovery site in a SRM deployment hold configuration information corresponding to the Protected virtual machines. Part of this configuration includes the memory allocated to each virtual machine.

The Provision Space calculation seen in the vSphere Client is the amount of disk space a virtual machine is configured to use, including disk and swap space. The swap space that is required by a virtual machine is equal to the provisioned memory minus the reserved memory. This is expected behavior. Since the SRM placeholder virtual machines are never be powered on, this space is not allocated and used on disk.

The Used Space displayed in the vSphere Client is the amount of disk space currently consumed by the virtual machine's files. For SRM placeholder virtual machines, the used space should remain small (usually less than 1MB).

Additional Information

For more information, see About Placeholder Virtual Machines and Inventory Mapping in the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Administration Guide.