How to zoom in on snapshot size per virtual machine

[honderdijk]

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

[radek_kubka]

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

[billshaffer]

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

[rjparker1]

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/