How do I monitor snapshots globally

[smint]

We use thick provisioned virtual disks in VMware but use thin provisioned volumes on our SAN (known as thick on thin).

We backup our VMs using Backup Exec which creates a VMware snapshot, backs up the snapshot and then deletes it.

When backups fail it can leave the snapshot behind which then uses more and more disk space on the SAN until we notice it and delete it.

The thin provisioned SAN volumes can only grow, not shrink, so the extra space that has been used while the snapshot was growing is now being wasted on the SAN.

We therefore need an easy way to monitor snapshots without going into the snapshot manager for every VM, just somewhere that would list of all snapshots in our cluster would do.

Any ideas ?

Thanks

[harrygunter · Accepted solution]

You could create an Alarm in the VC, there is a default one available VM Snapshot size (GB) customise that for the size warnings and email alert.

Or use powercli to run a script every day to send a list or running snapshots, there are some scripts around already that you can use (Chris Uys did one).

Mark