Storing VM's on a caddy

[snakefood]

Hi,

I am about to offload a load of servers to the cloud and would like to dump all the old vm's onto a disk to chuck in a cupboard for archiving. I have VMWare servers, with the used capacity being around 5.5TB. My question is, when I copy these out of the VM data store to an ntfs store (portable hdd in a caddy) is the data going to expand, and if so, by how much? Will i be the same as, more or less, or is there a guide for capacity planning?

 

[snakefood]

That is my intention - I'm literally just going to copy them from VMWare data store to the hdd, I just wasn't sure if there is any compression applied to the files on VMware?

 

[snakefood]

Its depends upon how you move the files as to how they end up; simply downloading via the datastore browser will mean full VMDK size. Exporting to OVA would be the most time consuming and CPU intensive process but would yeild the smallest data set post export. I'd personally look at doing this option and just scripting it.

cheers - think I'll do exactly just this, I've prob got enough space on a nas to dump the ova's on, then I can just copy the whole lot off to the caddy. time isn't really a problem, as I'm just archiving for storage.

Many thanks ecksmen