VM Snapshot Alerts

No patch or update without the create snapshot functions that gave the administrator a new way of protecting the systems from broken patch installations or configuration modifications. If something goes wrong, you can simply use the VM snapshot to return to the previous status, making the problem a thing of the past and enabling you to try again.  Nearly all backup products that specialize in the usage of VMware support use snapshots automatically.

But, snapshots have their drawbacks, as they use capacities on the datastore in addition to the basic hard drive files. A so called Delta-file can grow to be as large as the data file, meaning a 40 GB basic virtual hard drive can create a Delta file amounting to another 40 GB per snapshot. Depending on the free drive space, this may quickly lead to space shortages on the datastore if snapshots are kept for a long period of time or very extensive modifications are conducted on the data (e.g. database upgrades) during the existence of snapshots. Therefore, you should consistently monitor snapshots for size, age, and growth rate.

So it would be great to get automatic VM Snapshot Alerts and visual warnings when too many snapshots are there or they grow too big.

Snapwatcher can definitely help with detecting and fixing snapshots and Zombie snapshots, but it’s not a service and can’t alert on Snapshot growth or count. That is a part Performance Analyzer can do easy (as well as tons of other things).

Read the entire article here, VM Snapshot Alerts – opvizor

via the fine folks at opvizor.