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Image size and multiple disks
Hello guys,
I am working with databases that we have separated out onto multiple drives due to the large sizes of the file groups and I am a bit concerned that the documentation states the image will pull all of the files into one. One of the databases, for example, is around 3TB currently and provisioning a drive that size doesn't seem feasible in our current environment structure.
Is there a way to split the image into multiple files across drives or some other way to prevent having to host the source all on one disk? (we are in a VM sphere by the way so the 3TB would actually be across multiple drives I'm guessing).
I am working with databases that we have separated out onto multiple drives due to the large sizes of the file groups and I am a bit concerned that the documentation states the image will pull all of the files into one. One of the databases, for example, is around 3TB currently and provisioning a drive that size doesn't seem feasible in our current environment structure.
Is there a way to split the image into multiple files across drives or some other way to prevent having to host the source all on one disk? (we are in a VM sphere by the way so the 3TB would actually be across multiple drives I'm guessing).
Comments
At the moment we don't have a way to split a SQL Clone image across multiple drives - you're right that creating an image will involve pulling all .mdf and .ldf files into one file in order to create the image. (Clones subsequently made from that image will be much smaller, of course.)
If you can virtualize your storage to present a single volume which spans multiple underlying disks (e.g. using dynamic volumes, RAID or a SAN) this could be used to store a single larger file. If this isn't possible for you then unfortunately you may not be able to use SQL Clone for your database at the moment, but we'll keep your feedback in mind when considering future development.
Thanks for the update!