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VMWare Snapshot Performance Hit?

I am using snapshots for VMs before I run Windows updates on them, as these past few months have been really bad for Microsoft updates. Lots of potential for RGEs. Anyway. I am wondering, in a scenario where you have a couple (2 or 3) of VMs running on a single physical 7200 RPM hard drive, how bad of a performance hit will these VMs have if I leave them running on a snapshot for a few days? IE no more than a week. I just want to leave some time to suss out any problems these updates may have before I delete the snapshot.

Do you think a week is fine for hard drive IO?

Thanks

SOLUTION

Mohammed Khawaja

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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SOLUTION

Dawid Fusek

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Dawid Fusek

additionally CnicNV,

to give you more real life example, I have a 2 presales on my VI, and they are installing/testing/learning and making a workshops of some BI software (fat software with SQL, Java, .NET), they of course using a snapshots (they have such permission in my VI), and if my storage start goes into performance problems... I look firstly for them and their snapshots (and other snapshots of course) because these VMware poor feature really can kill the performance and act as evil to a storage, VM and whole VI performance.

And sometimes deleting these snapshots took more than 16h !!! :((

best regards
NTShad0w

CnicNV

ASKER

Ok thanks for the feedback, it seems almost unanimous.

Too bad really, its seems like in theory Snapshots would be fantastic. Ahh well, I will use them with great caution in future. I have already deleted the snap for one of the VM since the Microsoft RGEs did not cause any issues. I will delete the other VMs snapshot today, since it too seems to be ok.

Thanks again.

Dawid Fusek

good, we gave You some point mate,

the theory of VMware snapshots is fare more brutal than marketing materials, it's one of feature that still can be improved by a vendor.

Also I have to add that here, that if You some day will have a storage based on ZFS there is a possibility to use a ZFS snapshots that are far more efficient, but much more difficult to manage (from cli), not working per VM if used with NFS (working per VM when used with iSCSI as a RDM to single VM) and require a storage server based on ZFS.

good luck mate.

kind regards
NTShad0w