Virtual Machine Snapshot Usage Analysis - wrong numbers?

[jannep]

HI!
I started looking at our snapshot alerts and I found that it does not show correct numbers. The alert shows the size of the machine including snapshots. Not only snaphots.

Example:
"The total size (of all snapshots) is 145 408.03 MB. Large snapshots files can rapidly fill up datastore space. Such snapshots also take a long time to commit when finally deleted."

That machine has a disk of 140 000 MB So the snapshot is infact only 5 000 MB (no worries there). Is this a bug in the management pack? It should only look at the snapshot size.

[sergey.g]

Hi Jan,

Could you shere with us screenshot of a datastore browser pointed onto the folder with snapshots for this VM?

VMware will switch and accumulate vmdks for snapshots when you do another one and another one, also there should be a snapshot of memory file, so maybe there is some kind of confusion about what exactly the snapshot is?

Thanks.

[jannep]

There must have been an error with the numbers that day.
Probably the numbers were that high when the alert was triggered but when we checked it had shrunk or created a new snapshot (snapshot was from veeam).

[sergey.g]

Hi,

Well such huge snapshot for backup purposes could be exactly because this VM already has a snapshot, if it's sitting there for quite some time and VM is actively doing something on the disk, the size of the snapshot could grow significantly and rapidly and because of this pre-existing snapshot Veeam Backup will need more time backing up the VM. Possibly because of all of the above factors, the snapshot size grow even further and you see the alert from Veeam MP.

You can check the following thread in Backup forum on why it's not a best practice to have a snapshot for a VM which should be backed up.
https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup- ... 13288.html