09 Dec 2013
By Yendis

VMware ESXi Snapshot Placement

VMware,
Recently I came across an issue after recently upgrading an environment from ESXi 4.1 to ESXi 5.1 update 1 when I started to get issues with snapshots filling up LUNS.  After analysing what was going on I noticed that when a snapshot was initialized, the snapshot file placement was different and was causing space issues. On ESX 4.x environment the delta disks were stored in the directory specified by the workingDir parameter. This was typically the same directory as the configuration files for the virtual machine On ESXi 5.x environment to facilitate the improvements to Storage vMotion and the new Storage DRS feature, a change to the snapshot process…
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10 Jun 2013
By Yendis

Best practices for VMware Snapshots

VMware,
I have come across a number of forums and emails were people are unsure on the proper use of snapshots and on occasions using snapshots for the wrong reason.  I found a great VMware article which I think covers everything you need to know about snapshots and the correct use:- Snapshots are not backups. A snapshot file is only a change log of the original virtual disk. Therefore, do not rely on it as a direct backup process. The virtual machine is running on the most current snapshot, not the original vmdk disk files. Snapshots are not complete copies of the original…
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