Virtual Machines. Snapshot Summary

This report shows snapshot age and size statistics for the selected scope of virtual machines.

Description

Outdated snapshots consume valuable storage resources and grow at a higher than standard disk rate. In addition, unless you have a hardware support for VM snapshots (such as in VSAN or VVOLs), removing or consolidating snapshots in future may cause VM downtimes, since vSphere generates additional storage traffic while performing these tasks. That is why best practices for snapshots recommend that you delete snapshots older than 3 days, since they no longer reflect recent VM changes.

The report helps you detect outdated snapshots and better address the problem of storage capacity waste.

Parameters

Date/time Selection: defines a time period to analyze in the report. Applies only to the drill-down Veeam Performance Details Report.

Scope: defines a list of Groups or Objects to include in the report (by default, the VMware Virtual Machine Group is selected). The Add Group option returns a Group and all objects that a group contains (with all performance counter instances). The Add Object option returns only the selected object.

Sample Usage

Report on up-to-date VM snapshots and display snapshot size and age statistics for this month.

Instructions

1. Open the Virtual Machines. Snapshot Summary report.
2. From the From list, select This month > First day. From the To list, select Today.
3. Leave the Scope section without changes.
4. Click Run to view the report.

Report Output

The report will provide the full list of VMs with snapshots. For each VM, the report will show the date when each snapshot was created, snapshot size and snapshot description.

You can click a VM name in the Virtual Machine column of the output table to drill down to the Veeam Performance Details Report and review how the snapshotSize and snapshotAge VM performance metric values have been changing during this month.