topic Re: What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore? in ONTAP Discussions

What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore?

netappmagic — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:08:36 GMT

We are taking daily snapshots on a few datastores, and found very large size of snapshots are produced.

I don't have the access to these VM's (Windows), is there any way to find out what VM's and what Virtual disks or their change rates caused these snapshots? If powercli script would be the solution, do you have one? Thanks!

Re: What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore?

paul_stejskal — Mon, 25 May 2020 16:31:19 GMT

You'd have to look at the VMs themselves. Typically page files or things like DB temp files cause this. The recommendation would be to separate those out into a separate volume that isn't deduped/mirrored.

Re: What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore?

SpindleNinja — Tue, 26 May 2020 14:09:25 GMT

check out a program called RVTools. it's very good detailed report of your vcenter.

Re: What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore?

netappmagic — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 13:54:08 GMT

on Window servers, are there commands to tell the amount of data or blocks being changed? If so, I can then have an idea about how much space being produced by this VM for Snapshots space.

Re: What VM's are causing large snapshots on a datastore?

paul_stejskal — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:39:56 GMT

You'll probably have to run Resource Monitor/perfmon and see what is writing to disk. That's about all I know of.