Monitor changes/data within a VM

[ETHERE]

Does anyone know if it is possible to monitor the changes (delta's) within the VM's, does vmware have some kind of monitoring tool even a 3rd party program out there somewhere? I am doing snapshots of the VM systems and the snapshots are large I don't know what is changing so much within the VM's.

[jbruelasdgo]

it will come in the new version of VMware ESX (vSphere)

you will be able to monitor this

right now be careful when using snapshots, if you leave them running, and you keep making changes to your VM, the snapshot will grow until there is no disk space left

regards

Jose Ruelas

[Troy_Clavell]

the snapshot will grow until there is no disk space left

a snapshot can only be as big as it's original disk. So if you have an 8GB .vmdk, the snap can only grow that large. Now in 3.0.x days a snap could get out of control.

I agree with you, snapshots should not be left for more than a couple of days.

[ETHERE]

The vmsnaps were used to see the difference in changes, and I am getting alot. I thought this was only an issue with the NetApp snapshots but I guess not, the netapp snapshots are almost the same size. Because of the size I am not able to retain alot of the snapshots. Does anyone here also see approximately 3GB-6GB of changes per VM within a day, because when I run a nightly snapshot I get that much change each day.