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Randy_B
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Using snapshots in production

I'm curious as to what others are doing for best practice around snapshots. I've always kept snapshots off of our production machines and LUNs in order to keep things simple, avoid redo files that never get committed and avoid the concern of them filling up the free space on the lun that is there for vmkernel paging. We always keep 10% free space on each lun and have a seperate environment for dev that snapshots are allowed. I do get a lot of requests though from people that want to take a snapshot on the production system prior to an upgrade.

Randy

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weinstein5
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I agree with how you are handling your production environment - you should not run with snapshots. For the situation where someone wants to apply an upgrade to a production system it shoudl have already been tested in a test environemnt - if it is a situation where you will take a snapshot of the production machine set very definite time limits - 24 hours it will be committed to the disk -

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weinstein5
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I agree with how you are handling your production environment - you should not run with snapshots. For the situation where someone wants to apply an upgrade to a production system it shoudl have already been tested in a test environemnt - if it is a situation where you will take a snapshot of the production machine set very definite time limits - 24 hours it will be committed to the disk -

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Texiwill
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Hello,

As Weinstein5 stated, limiting snapshot times is key. It is a management issue as well. Snapshots have their uses, but if they grow too big they directly affect performance of all the resources in use and can cause loss of network access for a VM with a snapshot, plus increased CPU utilization to handle the large snapshot. Large is around 100GBs however.

THat would be an interesting addition to the VMware tool suite, a tool that goes through and allows you to set a time limit on how long snapshots will live and warn you if they exist past that time.


Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
lmonaco
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I also agree. Strict controls should be put around snapshots or they will quickly get out of hand, don't let them set around. We'll use them in dev, test and maybe staging, but try to avoid using them in production.

A time limit feature would be great!

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Randy_B
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Thanks for the feedback. Yes, some policy tools around snapshots would be a great addition.

Randy

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ibeerens
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You can use powershell to report the snapshots active in your enviroment. I created a healthcheck script that reports active snapshots on VMs and reports the information to a HTML file. You can schedule this script to run and send an e-mail with HTML file.

You can download the powershell scripts at my site.

www.ivobeerens.nl

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desh_thomson
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Yes, that's a great powershell script and we use it weekly in our environment. Thanks for putting that together.

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Randy_B
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This is a great script. Thanks!

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