Taming the Snapshot Sprawl: How VCF Operations Makes Snapshot Management Painless
In large-scale infrastructure environments—especially within service providers—managing VM snapshots can feel like trying to herd cats. Everyone has access to create snapshots (developers, admins, QA, you name it), but rarely does anyone take responsibility for cleaning them up. The result? A sprawling, unmanaged jungle of stale snapshots that quietly eat up your storage and increase your risk profile.
If you’ve ever spent hours manually digging through vCenter to find and remove old snapshots, you know the pain. Fortunately, VCF Operations offers a powerful and elegant solution.
The Snapshot Problem at Scale
Snapshots are invaluable tools for troubleshooting, testing, and backups. But they come with a catch:
- They consume disk space, especially as they age.
- They impact VM performance over time.
- They pose risk to production environments if forgotten.
Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of VMs in a service provider environment, and you’ve got a serious management problem.
Enter VCF Operations: Visibility, Automation, and Control
VCF Operations helps solve the snapshot sprawl problem through a combination of real-time visibility, automated alerts, and intelligent remediation workflows.
🔍 Full Snapshot Visibility
With VCF Operations, you get a centralized dashboard showing all active snapshots across your environment:
- Age of each snapshot
- Number of snapshots per VM
- Size and growth over time
- Location and resource pool
No more logging into individual vCenters or writing custom scripts—everything is presented in one clean, customizable UI.
There is a really good dashboard available from Mr. VCF Operations Brock Peterson. You can just download and import it into your VCF Operations.
⚠️ Smart Alerts and Policies
You can configure snapshot policies to trigger alerts based on:
- Snapshot age thresholds (e.g., older than 7 days)
- Size (e.g., larger than 10 GB)
- Number of snapshots per VM
Alerts can be surfaced in the dashboard, sent via email, or pushed into ITSM tools like ServiceNow. This means teams are notified before snapshots become a problem—not after.
📊 Executive-Level Reporting
For service providers or enterprises that need to show compliance or usage trends, VCF Operations provides:
- Monthly reports of snapshot usage by team or tenant
- Chargeback/showback reports for snapshot storage
- SLA dashboards to enforce governance policies
You can even expose these reports to tenants through VCF Operations for Logs and VCF Operations for Applications integrations.
Why It Matters
Snapshot sprawl is more than an annoyance—it’s a cost, performance, and risk issue. Manual processes don’t scale, and delegating responsibility rarely works in large environments.
>
