Unresponsive VMs during VM snapshots

[Moker1]

I am working with a client and they are having issues with VM snapshots. When a VM snapshot is taken through VirtualCenter the snapshot is pretty slow, while the snapshot is being created, the VM is unresponsive through Remote Console and not available on the network. When the snapshot is completed, everything starts working. We have removed VMware Tools File Sync driver (I have seen issues at other sites) and VSS support driver is enabled. The VMs are mostly Windows 2003. There are no errors in VirtualCenter or on the logs in the VM. The client also updated everything to 3.5 U3 last night and the issue still is occuring.

Ideas?

Thanks,

[athlon_crazy]

did your customer having number of snapshot for each vm? In my case, I had to removed old snapshot otherwise snapshot process during vcb hell too slow.

[Moker1]

No, there are no existing snapshots.

[rstierna]

i had an issue a while back with recommitting large snapshots which was resolved in update 1. One of the changes we made was to change the default Sc memory to the max of 800mb. I also sometimes check the logs in /var/log while the snapshots are running. Maybe you can identify the issue there.

[Moker1]

After further investigation, it appears to be an issue if we select the snapshot the virtual machines memory. If we deselect this option, the snapshots complete very quickly. What are the risks if we do not snapshot the memory?

[Kahonu]

I think "risk" may not be the correct term. When you snapshot w/o memory - and decide to revert to that snapshot, the VM will reboot. For my purposes, I never saw the need to keep RAM contents.