Is it a good idea to take snapshots of production servers at regular intervals. I am reading a lot of website that suggest that you should not take snapshots of production systems, stating that it can effect network and machine performance. Anybody have any insight on this?
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Network performance can be degrated during the snapshot process. But in my opinion a little bit of a perofrmance hit is better than losing data. Depending on how critical the data is I would maybe do one during the night. Unless your data is that critical that you must do Hourly etc. Only you can decied how much data you can lose should you need to restore. If you can live with a snapshot 24 hours old stick with it. But if you need your data no less than an hour old from a restore do that. We run snapshots hourly for our main database server as this changes hourly. But our Exchange Server is snapshotted every 12 hours. | |||
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I LOVE VMWare Snapshots! This is such an awesome feature for DEV and QA servers. On a production machine, the most common problem I hear from IT staff is the disk space they take up. Planning ahead can mitigate this but there are always going to be finite limits in a production environment. In other words, you can only take as many snapshots as your disks will hold. Most of the time, my customers take snapshots only when they need a full backup of the guest OS environment. So, for instance, we wil take a snapshot before installing a major application update. We probably will not take a snapshot if the VM is running a database server, and instead just back up the databases in use inside. Like Shane above, I'd say the performance hit is less important, especially if the server's CPU isn't usually pegged out and you can schedule the snapshots to be taken during off-peak times. YMMV. | |||
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Generally, disk performance (and size expansion of the VM's storage) is the concern with snapshots, as disk is now split between the flat disk and the snapshot disk (potentially multiple snapshot disks); a simple disk operation when there is no snapshot can significantly balloon, potentially needing to work with data on both the base and (multiple) snapshot disks (which are not contiguous with the base or each other; adding much additional seek time), requiring a lot more IO time than on a flat disk. Evaluate your disk performance; if it doesn't impact you significantly then snapshot away. | ||||
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