ESXi5 snapshot growth compared to ESX4.1

[paulck]

Hi All

I have a strange problem which I cant seem to get to the bottom of.

I had some guests running on an esx4.1 host, snapshots of an idle machine would grow by around 1.5gb per 12 hours for no real reason.

I removed the snapshots and migrated the guest to a esxi5 host with different storage.

Snapshot the guest in the same fashion and let the machine idle, zero/minimal growth of the snapshot as you would expect.

Is this something to do with differences between esx4.1 and esxi5 and how they handle snapshots?

Regards

Paul

[continuum]

unexpected snapshot growth often is caused by auto-defrag-tools running in the background  inside the guest - did you check that ?

[psplnalin123]

Just let me know how much memory you have give to the Virtual machine and the snapshot you have take at the time of VM was running or power off.

[peetz]

The size of the snapshot file reflects the amount of data that was changed/written on the VM's virtual disk (inside the guest OS) since the snapshot was created.

So, it really should not depend on the version of ESX(i) you are running. There must be something else that changed in the guest OS at the time you migrated the machine to vSphere 5, in a way that now there are less changes to the VM's disk.

- Andreas

[paulck]

Hi, thanks for the replies

Just to confirm the snapshots were taken when the machine was powered off, it is a test machine so absolutely no changes were made to the guest between moving hosts. I will check regarding the defrag.

Regards

[paulck]

Memory allocated is 3gb