VMware Cloud Community
faster4233
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-08-2011 12:39 AM

Equal logic PS400E to Snapshot or not?

Hi,

We have a PS4000E which is about to take some of our datastores for VMware.  What i was wondering is it worth enabling Snapshotting for vmware Volumes on the SAN?

Is it worth using twice the space?  Are they used by the vmware Storage APIs?

Thanks for the help.

David

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2 Replies
vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-08-2011 06:10 AM

Hello.

It depends.  I personally don't think (for most use cases) that the space used for these snapshots is justified.  In most use cases, one can leverage VMware snapshots or true backup methods to provide the required restore points.  If your business/customer requires more options than this approach provides, then the snapshots can be a viable option.  Again, for most workloads I will set the snapshot reserve space to 0 and move on.

Good Luck!

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
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BenConrad
Expert
Expert
‎03-08-2011 08:05 PM

Yeah, snapshot reserve usage on EQL boxes is huge.  EQL uses 16MB block sizes so each time your VM writes to disk (and it will do this 1-3 times/second) you might be writing out a new 16MB block into snap reserve.

Same issues with replication, replication deltas are huge on EQL.

Ben

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