It should be mentioned here, that consolidation process is very demanding towards I/O subsystem, so it is not recommended to make it during working hours when production virtual machines are loaded. For example, on a fully-loaded mail server, the snapshots consolidation process will take much time.

Storage subsystem load by virtual machine during consolidation.

ESXi host-server load during snapshot taking.

Data type in snapshots files (zeros or random data).

Storage subsystem performance, including FC-fabric, Storage Processors, LUNs (amount of disks in the group, RAID type etc.).

Moreover, when there are several snapshots, the consolidation goes in several stages. The more snapshots, the more metadata is available to analyze before consolidation.

Number of snapshots (number of delta files) and their size.

The more data on the delta disk, the longer it should be applied to the base disk. Delta disks size is obviously the most important characteristic.In this case, snapshots consolidation function should be used ( Consolidate option in context menu):ĭeleting snapshots, both with Delete All button and with Consolidate function, is called consolidation.įirst, let’s see factors that affect time of virtual machine snapshots consolidation process: If an error occurs during deletion, then snapshot files may stay there on the storage.

Thus it would be a good thing to know in advance how much time it takes.Īs a reminder, initialization of deleting snapshots in vSphere Client with Delete All function leads to their immediate deletion from GUI, but at the storage, this process takes much time. At some point you may need to delete/consolidate virtual machine snapshots ( Delete All button in Snapshot Manager), which is quite time-consuming and demanding in terms of storage performance. However, using them in large infrastructures is unavoidable. Snapshots in VMware vSphere often cause various problems with configurations and performance, unless they are properly used – for live backup of virtual machines and temporary keeping VM configuration before the update. StarWind Virtual Tape Library (VTL) OEM.

Vmware disk consolidation needed