topic Re: How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine in ONTAP Discussions

How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine

honderdijk — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:58:54 GMT

I was wondering if there's an easy way to see wich virtual machines are causing exceptional snapshot growth inside NFS-based VMware datastores?

Re: How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine

radek_kubka — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:09:34 GMT

Hi Hans and welcome to the Communities!

There is nothing obvious that springs to mind to do what you are looking for.

Two things though:

- I would try to figure out whether OS-level defragmentation has been run / is scheduled on any of these VMs

- Are you running deduplication on this volume? If snapshots growth is 'exceptional', then it may simply mean dedupe savings have been shifted into snapshots (http://communities.netapp.com/message/22012#22012)

Regards,
Radek

Re: How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine

billshaffer — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:57:52 GMT

Best I've been able to do is watch system monitors of the guests for high disk i/o - that tells me which one is changing blocks, which would then show as snaps. Make sure you're not snapping vswp as well (should be on a different volume) as that will inflate your snapshots also.

Bill

Re: How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine

rjparker1 — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:00:10 GMT

Hans Onderdijk wrote:

I was wondering if there's an easy way to see wich virtual machines are causing exceptional snapshot growth inside NFS-based VMware datastores?

You may not be able to tell growth, but there is a tool that lets you see ALL the snapshots at once from the VM's so you can keep an eye on them..

This is easier by pointing it to a vCenter but it will work at the ESX host level.

http://www.robware.net/