Most virtual infrastructure admins are fully aware of the many benefits of snapshots. They’re a marvelous way to test out new software releases and patches, since the ability to back out is just one click away. I’ve seen them used in development this way, or also when capturing with memory, they can provide an excellent mechanism to try and reproduce a problem.
There are, however, concerns associated with snapshots. They can consume inordinate disk space, can affect performance, and can be a source of significant risk if reverting to an older snapshot that has not been patched in some time.
I have heard from a few admins who have been burned, where the policy in their environment is now one of “zero tolerance” for snapshots. These environments have decided that allowing snapshots is just too risky, and so admins are no longer allowed to make use of this capability at all.
Unfortunately in some cases “zero tolerance” is not the best way to solve a problem. With a little bit of effort the concerns can be easily overcome, and the benefits even more fully realized.
Customers who use Embotics V-Commander receive great benefits from its snapshot management capabilities, with the risks easily mitigated. V-Commander lets you create, delete, and revert snapshots, but this is not new. The additional benefit is having all of the integrated capabilities of a self-service portal, that also provides snapshot management to end users. These portal users can decide to take and revert snapshots as they please, without having to interrupt the very busy admins.
In order to keep a handle of this growing inventory of snapshots, V-Commander also provides the necessary reporting insight. There are report flavors that show you Virtual Machines, number of snapshots, creator, disk size, snapshot age, and whether it is currently being used. Just a few examples of how this can leveraged are to generate reports for VMs with more than 2 snapshots, or snapshots that are older than 30 days, or snapshots owned by a particular user. The reports can be scheduled to run at the admins preferred frequency, thus easily keeping on top of the environment.
Combining the delegated snapshot management and snapshot reporting insight, you can create a much more agile virtual environment, while at the same time mitigating the risks. With a very little bit of effort, the payback for snapshot management in your environment could be well worth it.
Do you have experiences, either positive or negative with managing snapshots? If so, I’d love to hear it.
