VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘snapshots’

I’ve posted about dealing with ESX snapshots before, but it seems to always be a topic that resurfaces. It’s almost as if there is a “virtualization school of hard knocks” and dealing with open ESX snapshots is a required course. Maybe the misunderstanding is so widespread because a lot of administrators first use VMware Workstation before implementing production servers hosted on ESX?

Anyways, there is a lot of information about snapshots and the problems they can get you in already on the web, but this week Jason Boche posted Know thy open snapshots
which I found to be very informative and helpful. The title of my post was taken from an eye opening quote from Jason:

“Unfortunately in the current builds, VMware doesn’t give us real good (or automated) visibility of open snapshots. I liken it to handing a loaded gun to a child – it’s only a matter of time before an accident happens. That analogy is quite extreme but it gets my point across …”

Read Jason’s post in it’s entirety for much more information, but I particularly like his explanation Read the rest of this entry »

There are several ways to determine if you have virtual machines with snapshots. Why you would want to know has been covered In various other posts both here at VM /ETC as well as on the other virtualization blogs. It’s so important that the virtualization community has created different tools and scripts to identify and monitor snapshot files for administrators.  So, when I read the post WWoIT – Wayne’s World of IT: Find VM snapshots in ESX/VC I had an experience that Aaron Delp described as “/HEADDESK” (when he commented on my uploading files with the VI Client post).

It may not be the fanciest of methods, but probably the quickest way to find VM snapshots is to use the ls command from the ESX Service Console. By piping the output with grep to find files with the snapshot extension, .vmsn, and using the recursive switch you can scan all the VMFS LUNs visible to an ESX host. That’s so simple it hurts!

To use the ls command to find snapshots do the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Avoiding storage array snapshot pitfalls in a VMware environment is an article and tip published by Scott Lowe for Searchvmware.com. Scott discusses the design challenges and implications of combining the snapshot abilities of VMware ESX with the SAN based snapshot features of storage devices. The tip points out that incorrect configuration of VMware ESX with the storage device could lead to inconsistent and unusable images when trying to recover VMs.

“Because these snapshots are not, by default, integrated in any way with VMware ESX Server, we have to perform a few extra steps to ensure consistently reliable and usable storage array snapshots.”

Read all of Scott’s tip at the link to the article above.

My “2 cents” on this is that trying to configure the combination of the two snapshots manually might not Read the rest of this entry »