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Referring to this article

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025279

I know it is not good practice to keep a snapshot longer than a day or two because the performance can degrade.

The chain will very rarely go above 4 or 5

However we have a couple of application that before we can push to production have to be tested by the vendor.

Most are pretty good about getting in and testing within a couple days of the snapshot being taken, however there are a few who take a week or more.

There have a been a couple instances, maybe 3 or 4 in the past year we had to a do either a full system restore or a file level restore because the application did not work and we had to revert to the previous application and the snapshot had already been deleted.

The boxes are fairly busy, logging, email, etc.

How do other organizations deal with this? Is there a way to "backup" the snapshots?

Anthony Fornito
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3 Answers3

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How do other organizations deal with this?

I do more or less what you're doing. Keeping snapshots around for a few days for a specific reason isn't bad. You just need to make sure to not forget about them and let them "rot" for any longer than is needed. I have my monitoring system set to alert me if snapshots stay around for longer than three days.

Is there a way to "backup" the snapshots?

Not backup the snapshots per se, but better than that - use a product like Veeam to backup your VM images on a regular basis.

EEAA
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In my opinion, the simplest way will be just to backup VMs regularly, as @EEAA mentioned before.

We have quite large amount of VMs running in our environment. So we configured backup Every 1 week. Our setup is StarWind + Veeam.

Also, we considered other solutions, e.g. MS DPM, but encountered some issues with it. Veeam just works great.

Strepsils
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That's fine... you can live with a snapshot for a few days. Many of us have situations where failed backups or replication leave orphaned snapshots for far longer than 3 days. In my worst case, I inherited systems with 400 day-old snapshots.

For your use case, it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with the timelines you've described.

ewwhite
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