400GB Dedup iscsi target is 3.1TB SPDATA

[RobertSearle]

Version 6.0.5597 on Server 2012

I created a 400 Meg ISCSI target that is accessed by ESX VMWARE 5.0

The host reports there is 225 GB used space.
The SPDATA file is 3.1 TB and rapidly filling the entire volume.

How can I trim this file?

[anton (staff)]

V6 does not release back data (pretty much like Fossil in Plan/9). The best thing you can do is to migrate to V8 (keeping VMs backup of course) as it does have trim, TRIM, UNMAP, WRITE_SAME(zero) and other things to release space to OS.

[RobertSearle]

Migrate to 8?
Isn't 6 is the latest version of StarWind® iSCI SAN & NAS™
The data is not on a hypervisor, its on a stand alone 2012 server.

Maybe I missed something, setting up a 400GB dedup disk that turns into 3.1 TB is less than ideal, why wouldn't I have just setup a static target?
--Thank you

[anton (staff)]

That product is EOL-ed. StarWind Virtual SAN V8 is a successor of everything.

That dedupe disk as a side-effect keeps history of all the writes and snapshots so you can near-CDP to any point. Since MSFT had released their dedupe in Windows Server 2012 our previous engine made initially for backups (esp. VEEAM) is not used anymore and is replaced with a newer dedupe engine in V8 that's for running VMs.

Migrate to 8?
Isn't 6 is the latest version of StarWind® iSCI SAN & NAS™
The data is not on a hypervisor, its on a stand alone 2012 server.

Maybe I missed something, setting up a 400GB dedup disk that turns into 3.1 TB is less than ideal, why wouldn't I have just setup a static target?
--Thank you