This week saw a dev environment brought to its knees by vm snapshotting – the environment had been snapped the week before prior to a release but had then been left to its own devices. Ordinarily the machines this covers would not have suffered to badly as they are not data servers – however in this scripted run (another powershell script) it had snapped the whole environment including 5 SQL servers.
Nevertheless by the time I got to this environment the SQL servers had delta files totalling several 100GB a piece … I managed to pull four of them back from the brink – the fifth sadly didn’t make it.
That night I pondered how I could keep an eye on snapshots so they don’t bite me again – and a few searches led me to this very handy script - http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=106
I won’t go into detail here, as the writers site is an evidently better place to understand all the things it does – but it can tell you a huge amount about your ESX environment and plonk it into a rather useful html page.
In the end I plucked out the elements relating to snapshots to fashion a smaller leaner script for my purpose but if you haven’t got round to trying the Powershell Toolkit from VMWare you should …
The useful links are …
http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell
Continue Reading
