mastrboy wrote:
We do practically the same thing, but we defrag the VM before running sdelete or similar to have as much continuous free space as possible.
Also the following can get you a few GB's back from each windows VM if you haven't runned it for a few windows update cycles: dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup /resetbase
I always like these discussions since I'm always on the lookout to make my Windows images better
If your 3par is all SSDs, is there any point to doing a defrag? Assuming the right conditions, if you're thin in vmware then windows won't defrag your disks anyway since it detects them as thin. If you're thick in vmware I think it will do the defrag but if you're backed by SSDs on a 3par, is there any point? I've stopped doing defrags a while ago since I don't think it helps much with a 3par with SSDs.
I do run sdelete to free up space since I don't have auto unmap at the moment and then holepunch the vmdk to make it that much faster to clone.
For the dism command, I've taken to running windows maintenance from the control panels twice after doing updates to do all the cleanup and reclaim space. I think it ends up doing something similar to your commend but that command is something i've been meaning to investigate.
mastrboy wrote:
And to maximize dedupe you should format your drives with a blocksize of something that divides on 16 (for example 16k, 32k or 64k), as the 3par dedupe use 16k pages. (windows default is 4k).
Though I'm not sure if this is still valid for InformOS 3.3.x on the new dedupe algorithm.
I'm no expert but I believe 16k is still the magic number. I've found nothing to say otherwise as of yet.