v8 missing the safe removal of snapshot larger than...

[daniel.negru]

Hi,

I did the mistake of moving to v8 ~1 month ago as it has some netapp support in it. I put the SP1 today. I hope will correct a few issues v8 brought: oracle on win2k3 for example.

Anyways, does anyone know why the advanced feature of removing snapshots in stages has been removed?
I am facing some issues with exchange backups. It takes too long and by the end of it the snapshot size is somewhere on the 50GB + size causing the exchange DAG to switch over to DR during snapshot removal.

Thank you,
Daniel.

[chrisdearden]

Why do you feel you made a mistake?

The safe snapshot removal feature was for VI 3 installations. Vsphere 4 and above does it automatically. V8 does the support VI3 so I would imagine they removed the feature from the UI.

The best way to get around the issue woud be to leverage the backup from storage snapshots feature with your NetApp.

[daniel.negru]

RE: Why do you feel you made a mistake?
1. Because I had issues with backups right after, especially with older oracle servers requiring me to babysit the backups through the night & research.
2. Because we just bought the NetAPP and switch to it pretty much in the same time with Veeam upgrade. Now the backups take twice as long spilling into production hours and I am unsure if is the NetApp at fault (probably) or Veeam. I should have waited and do baby steps. I always rush into things...

RE: Vsphere 4 and above does it automatically.
I did not watch the vmdks religiously during that time but according to what I noticed it did not seem to be the case.

RE: The best way to get around the issue woud be to leverage the backup from storage snapshots feature with your NetApp.
Never tried direct SAN access, I will have to get to it apparently or face weekly exchange server issues. Thank you for the suggestion.

[Gostev]

ESXi 3.5 U2 was when VMware started doing a far better "safe snapshot removal" than ours natively. Better because we only created an extra snapshot once, while VMware creates it multiple times if necessary (until the snapshot becomes small enough to be commited within a reasonable VM stun period).

[daniel.negru]

Well, it must be the sluggish NetAPP @ fault, the snapshot is being removed in hours, about 2. Before it was not causing any problems and it took far less.

I just noticed that for an arm and a leg I can explore backup from SAN snapshots. Veeam requires the most expensive license (Enterprise Plus)for that feature.
Hmm... this is not going to fly... not soon anyways.

I will have to find workarounds.

Thank you.