Unusual vCenter Snapshot Created

[pjosafat]

Hi,

I recently saw an unusual behavior in our HPE Nimble array. I cloned a volume, mounted it to our vCenter, then registered a VM. Before powering on the VM, I noticed that a vCenter snapshot was created along with the VM that wasn't previously there. In fact, the snapshot has the exact same name as what the HPE Nimble's snapshot is named. The original VM that this clone is based on has no vcenter snapshots at all.

In the past, whenever I cloned a volume in our Nimble array, then register a VM, a vCenter snapshot was never created. For some reason, this time, it created one. I don't know if I should delete the snapshot since I can't tell if it has any ties to the original Nimble volume. As a reference, the original Nimble volume that I'm cloning from is being replicated from a different Nimble array. Also, this volume has several other VM's on it, and only one other VM had a snapshot created in its folder. These two VM's were the only VM's powered on at the time of the cloning. The other VM's that have no snapshots created are powered off.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? Again, I've never seen this happen in our environment until this one time. Could this be some setting I missed or never noticed until now that allows you to bring in a vCenter snapshot from the HPE Nimble snapshot? Or is there an underlying problem in our environment that now exists? Any help on this from anyone is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[pjosafat]

To add to this,  when looking at the Data Protection for this particular volume, it's part of a protection plan that has "VMware vCenter Synchronization" enabled. Would this be a factor for creating this snapshot?

I find it strange, though, that only the powered on VMs would have this snapshot created and not the powered off VMs that live on this volume. I also find it strange that I never saw this created the previous times I cloned volumes in the past unless we did change our Data Protection settings for that plan recently, but I know I didn't make that kind of a change. It's possible someone else on my team did, though.

[Thomas_Lam_HK]

The "Clone" volume is usually a second class volume (most use case are test/dev) but we also allows snapshot protection on it by Volume Collection.

We don't have specific design changes on volume clone operation which if the parent volume is protected by VC, cloned volume should be indenpendent unless manaully add to another VC for snapshot or replication protection.

If you really want know the detail,  please reachout to Nimble Support and they can review the log for you to find out the root cause.

[pjosafat]

Thomas,

Thank you for the reply, but I fully understand that the cloned volume is an independent, "second class volume". I understand it can have its own set of snapshots independent of the original volume from which it was cloned from. However, in this case, a snapshot was created within the cloned volume which didn't exist in the original VM. 

At this point, I think I can attribute this snapshot to the "VMware vCenter Synchronization" Data Protection setting on the original volume because I cloned a completely different volume yesterday which had a Data Protection setting that did not have VMware vCenter Synchronization enabled. It did not create a vCenter snapshot inside the cloned volume's datastore. So 6 months ago, I think when I cloned this volume, it did, in fact, create a snapshot within the cloned volume datastore and we may have just deleted it and I just couldn't remember if we did or not. 

I did delete the snapshot from the current cloned volume and it has been performing correctly.