Virtual Machine Snapshots

Use the Virtual Machine Snapshots dashboard to get information about snapshotting activities for virtual machines in your environment. Act on the data by consolidating, migrating, or deleting the snapshots.

On the Virtual Machine Snapshots dashboard, you can:

• See the number of snapshots per virtual machine.
• See the space used by the snapshots.
• Track the usage of resources that snapshots consume.
• Look at individual details about snapshot files such as file creation dates, file sizes, and so on.

The information displayed in each of the panels in the dashboard is determined by the selection you make in the drop-down lists.

Snapshots present on VM

On this panel the resources consumed by snapshots on the datastore are tracked. Look at the information in this view to see whether snapshot behavior has an impact on your overall environment. You can decide whether you want to make changes to the snapshot activity in your environment.

Use the drop-down lists to select a virtual center and a time range over which you want to examine snapshot activity.

Field	Description
Virtual Center	The name of the virtual center.
Virtual Machine.	The name of the virtual machine.
Datastore	The name of the datastore. Click on the datastore to drill down and see the snapshot details on it.
SnapshotFiles	The names of the files in the snapshot.
TotalFiles	The total number of snapshot files.
SnapshotSpace	The space used by vmsn (VMware snapshot) files. A vmsn file is used to store the exact state of the virtual machine when the snapshot was taken.
TotalSpace	A snapshot contains vmsn files along with other files. TotalSpace is the space used by vmsn files in addition to the space used by the following files: vmsd files that store the metadata or structure of the snapshot tree. vmdk files. Virtual Machine Disk files. These are descriptor files. delta.vmdk file. This file contains the changes made on this snapshot in relation with the parents.

Snapshot Statistics for Datastore

In this panel, use the drop-down lists to select a virtual center, a datastore, and a time range over which you want to examine snapshot activity.

Field	Description
Snapshot space used on disk	The chart displays the snapshot space (in bytes) used on the disk over the time range selected.
Number of Snapshots on datastore	The chart displays a count of the number of snapshots on the data store over the selected time range.