We’ve been using VDR for a while now evaluating if it would work in our environment.  On the whole it is a pretty solid product for a v1 release.  While doing our initial evaluation and going through the documentation we noticed that it was called out that having the VDR storage on a CIFS volume that was larger than 500gb would cause ‘performance issues’.  We wanted to user CIFS over a local VMDK so that we could have the data be outside our data center in the event we were in a DR situation.

Knowing this, for a variety of reasons,  we chose to use a CIFS share that was slightly larger than 500gb. (1.5tb, I know not even close to 500g!)  The documentation never said, DO NOT DO IT or anything like that!  They did not indicate that anything over 500g was not supported.

Well, I’m writing to tell you that anything ‘significantly’ over 500g volume size is NOT SUPPORTED.  By which I mean VMWare Support will not help you.  I know because they told me they could not help me.  The senior support guy for the Americas ‘laughed and walked away’ when told how big the volume is.

In our experience the app became completely unstable and unusable.  Backups were not being processed as expected, the interface would hang and freeze and we would have to restart the VIC app.  I guess in my mind ‘performance issues’ meant that the backups would slow and take longer to complete.  Alas, I suppose that could mean anything.

My feeling was that you could get away with something in the 600-700g range, but beyond that they will send you on your way.