VSM create smart clone from smart copy is not smart

Whoa back the truck up. I just started playing with this. Are you telling me that if I have a smart copy of a VM, and I right-click on that smart copy in VSM and select the "clone" option, that I'll be cloning the entire volume??

Yep, pretty much, don't think of VSM as a Veeam or vRanger or PHD Virtual or other snapshot based backup program.

Nowadays, you may "think" you need/get by with 10TB of SAN space, but might as well triple it as the Equallogic needs at least X's 2 the spare space for replication jobs, block changes and snapshots/smart copies, etc...

Smart Copy Clones....not for us, we have used the restore smart copy to restore a VM and it worked fine AND it allowed a workaround to NOT clone the whole volume, they just need to add this same feature to the SC.  Should be easy fix right Dell/Equallogic?

From 30,000 foot level, would be cool if VSM could also do FLR, not a programmer but I think someone could write some code to make this happen in the background.  Until SC is fixed, good ole' Robocopy and VSS Shadow Copies to a NFS drive for us... for now.

To add to Don; this is why you want to keep your volume sizes relatively small and not put 10+ VMs on a single volume/datastore. Performance is a good second reason to do this.

Going with a 1-to-1 ratio between volumes and VMs would be nice, but with the limit on the number of iSCSI sessions and most environments using 3-5 hosts with 2 NICs (and therefor 2 iSCSI sessions to each volume), you can run into the iSCSI session cap of the Equallogic array if you don't plan your environment properly.

Ok, thanks!

What is the iSCSI session cap, by the way?