VMware Snapshots on Nimble

[craig_gill]

Greetings,

I've been using Nimble for a while with our VMware instance and wanted a quick clarification:

Currently we have an hourly snapshot protection schedule on our Nimble arrays (3 of them). Someone in IT (that has since left) had created a daily snapshot job on the VMware side of things (using vSphere Management Assistant) that will take a list of all VMs in our vSphere world and snapshot them one at a time over 6-7 hours. There is also a cleanup script (that doesn't always function) that makes sure any previously created snapshot is removed before creating a new snapshot.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this completely pointless since we are snapshotting on the Nimble side of things? I understand from a user perspective that it's not ideal since our virtual consumers can't really see Nimble snapshots yet in the Web Client (cmon guys release the new 2.3 fw already!!!), but we are constantly running out of space, as well as have VM's that have absurd snapshot sizes (75-150+ GB), as well as snapshots that are constantly getting orphaned and need to be manually cleaned up.

[wvanhoolst45 · Accepted solution]

Hello Craig,

Happy to see that you are a Nimble customer.

I see you have a couple of concerns. About the 2.3 release. It is very solid for the moment and I have already a lot of customers using it. If you need a special functionality(web client) that is available with this release, just ask support@nimblestorage.com to safelist your array and you can download and use the code. 2.3.8 and 2.3.9 are both RC and can be used.

About snapshots there is an interesting Knowledge Article on Infosight that can be found here : Nimble Storage InfoSight

It highlights when to use Vcenter synchronized snapshots and when not...

Best regards

Walter

[jtmoree23]

I agree that vmware snaps are pointless when your array has them and counterproductive since it eats resources to create and delete snaps for no reason.  VMware recommends against keeping vm snaps long term.  They work best as a test/dev/devops tools.

[BBloksma]

Walter you wrote:

About snapshots there is an interesting Knowledge Article on Infosight that can be found here : Nimble Storage InfoSight

Strangely enogh I am not allowed to access that PDF, not even when I am logged into infosght. Is that document in a special container?