You can turn off your snap reserve (or reduce it) to help prevent this, you can also enable autogrow on your volumes.
It's odd that your VMs are creating such large snapshots, have you put their swap files on another drive and placed that vmdk file on another volume? I am running a couple of hundered VMs on ESX and our snapshots are generally in the 1-2% range for our servers.
Volume nfs9
working...
%/used %/total date name
---------- ---------- ------------ --------
1% ( 1%) 0% ( 0%) Feb 24 00:00 sv_daily.0 (snapvault)
2% ( 1%) 1% ( 1%) Feb 23 00:00 sv_daily.1
3% ( 1%) 1% ( 0%) Feb 22 00:00 sv_daily.2
4% ( 1%) 2% ( 0%) Feb 21 00:00 sv_daily.3
5% ( 1%) 2% ( 1%) Feb 20 00:00 sv_daily.4
7% ( 2%) 4% ( 1%) Feb 19 00:00 sv_daily.5
8% ( 2%) 5% ( 1%) Feb 18 00:00 sv_daily.6
From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Sayla, Mustafa Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:12 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: VMware on Netapp and snapshot
We are using Netapp as our backend for vmdk files on a NFS volume with de-duplication enabled. I am keeping two weeks worth of snapshots. Currently there are two NFS volumes, 4 ESX host server and about 60 guest servers. We are adding about 2 -3 virtual servers a week. What I am noticing that snap shot is taking a lot of space. I have set the reserve to 30% but it is taking about 35% per volume. Couple of times it has happened that a snap shot will happen during the day and the volume will be almost out of space and then VM guest will go offline as there is no log space to write. Once we clear space the guest machines come back on line. Is this normal for a VM storage volume to take up so much space in snap shot? We are getting almost 50% gain by doing deduplication which is pretty good. Any suggestion is appreciated.
Mustafa Sayla
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