VMware Snapshot Best Practices

hello thank you for joining us on our bite-size video training today we will be discussing creating and managing VMware snapshots in this lesson we will cover taking VMware snapshots restoring VMware snapshots managing and deleting VMware snapshots we'll start out in our view PDC client a we will be working with two training Windows 2008 VMs will first be taking a snapshot well we enter the snapshot manager you will see that you are here currently you're at the parents and there are no snapshots the current state of the VM is the only state now we will take a snapshot so we must give it a snapshot name the VM is running we are going to want to include the virtual memory if we revert back to this machine it will revert back to the exact powered on the state at the point of the tap snapshot there is an option to quest the guest file system it does require VMware tools properly installed if you get an error there are some VMware reference documents to the Microsoft VSS writer service and now you'll see the tasks start in V Center when you take a VMware snapshot you're creating a new Delta copy of the virtual machine disk the VMDK file and then you're now writing to that Delta so the more data that you're right the longer that it's going to take to commit and consolidate back into the parents yes you will eventually need to commit snapshots it is not recommended that you run in production with snapshots attached to your VM so we're going to take a look at a VM that has a few snapshots snapshots can be taken in the linear method you can also have snapshots with a process tree method we see here a chain of snapshots the parent and the children we have the ability to go to any point in time and then even come back forward if we wanted to let's say that you do go back we will revert back to a point we know that the software was working and the customer validated that things were good notice that the VM is powered on and reverted back to the exact state as when the snapshot was taken now we do have an abandoned snapshot that needs to be deleted and that child just simply gets discarded but first let's take a look at the data store that houses all of the VMDK and all these snapshots that we've been taken we can see the different VMs n which are the memory snapshots which are the maximum RAM of your virtual machine notice there's one per step shot that we have you can also see the VMDK and the deltas that have the zeros and the one and the zeros in the two they're small because this is a lab server and there's no data being written at the moment so now that you're still writing to a link pointing back to the original parent snapshot the new data gets written to the new disk when it comes time to consolidate and commit your snapshot the Delta copies will be written and added back to the parent disk so your storage will actually grow while they're being consolidated then it will delete the deltas at the end so before you click to delete and commit your snapshot you can look at the amount of free space that you have in your data store you can see the Delta VMDK and add the space to the master to ensure that you have enough buffer to not hit capacity while you're rolling the deltas into the parent before you hit commit once committing the snapshot the current VM state once again is the only VM state again we do not recommend leaving snapshots attached to your VM for any extended period of time and in fact when you do commit there will be a freeze in VM operation and disk i/o while the snapshot child is committed back to the parent leaving snapshots behind can cause you increased storage expense poor VM performance and potential V motion issues please use the delete all in the snapshot manager to freer VM of its stale snapshots

Channel: ArtisanInf

Views: 150,813

Keywords: VMware Snapshot, VMware, Best Practices

Id: A8KOh4CzmQc

Length: 4min 41sec (281 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 11 2012