Should I still use VMware snapshots with Nimble snapshots?

[bbollinger46]

Currently all of our Nimble volumes are using volume collection snapshots and replication to a downstream Nimble to support our VMware environment. We have one datastore per volume and several VMs per datastore. Our retention is set such that we keep 48 hourly, 30 daily, and 52 weekly snapshots.

I recently ran into an issue where I took a snapshot within VMware of a large VM which was kept around for a while and upon deleting the snapshot noticed a large increase in the size of next scheduled Nimble snapshot for that volume. Most snapshots of this volume for the last few weeks were around 2GB and this one was 256GB. I'm curious if this was likely caused by the VMware snapshot creation and removal. 

Should we still be taking manual snapshots within VMware if we are using Nimble snapshots or should we stick with the storage snapshots? I'm worried our use of VMware snapshots is causing us to retain redundant data in the Nimble snapshots. 

If deleting this VMware snapshot really did cause the Nimble snapshot growth, is there any way to reclaim this space without waiting for it to roll off in 52 weeks?

[jleonardini58]

Stick with the Storage snapshots.  VMWare snapshots will always behave the way you saw if you do not delete them immediately.  They are really pretty horrible. Nimble snapshots rock.

[dnewby121]

I would agree with John for long term snapshots, but if I'm making a quick change and I want to be able to immediately roll back I still use vmware snapshots.  Just make sure to delete them as soon as you are done and impact should be minimal.  I don't believe you can recover the space without manually deleting the snapshots or waiting.  

[rvvliet78110]

Like what the others say, stick with Nimble snapshots. As we have quite a large environment and many customer teams who seem to really like (and want to stick with) the VMware snapshots for OS and application updates this can get out of control very quickly. We came to the workflow, Create VMware snapshot and immediately after create a Nimble snapshot and then remove the VMware snapshot again. In case they need to roll back we just restore the snapshotted version of the VM to which they can revert to.