Measuring the time to delete a snapshot ??

[bigslash]

hi to all ,

I knew it  depend on lots of variants but i had to ask ; how can we measure the required time to commit a snapshot to a server.One of my customer has a very large delta.vmdk file (the snapshot was taken about a year ago..) and it is a windows 2008 r2 server with oracle database working on.

According to my knowledge ,it is much beeter , to shutdown the server and then try to commit the snapshot  but my customer wants to  knew the required time for this.

Which factors effects to commit a snapshot  ,or how can we make a guess the required time to commit a snapshot

Thanks a lot for the responses...

[piaroa]

It depends on your storage device's performance, size of the snapshot to be commited, number of snapshots, and even ESX version (snapshot commits were improved in 4.0U2 I believe).

For making a guesstimate, you could always use a test VM, take a snapshot, transfer a large file (2GB+?) and then remove the snapshot and see how long it takes and time it.

It's somewhat faster to commit snapshots when the VM is powered off, since there aren't changes to the disk.

[AndreTheGiant]

If you shutdown the server and start commit, then you cannot power-on until the operation has finished.

IMHO if prefer to do it online, maybe it require more time, but no stop.

Andre