Exclude a hard drive from a snapshot - Dell VSM

Hello, 

Unfortunately no.  There's no exclude option.  VMware creates the VM snapshots based on the configuration file.  Equallogic snapshots the entire volume, there's no "file" awareness. 

Regards,

Don 

That's fine. From my understanding, if we configure a snapshot schedule for a particular server it will be a incremental so only back up the files which have changed is that correct? 

If so the PageFile drive will always be changing will that affect the snapshot and also would it use a huge amount of space as its always changing it will keep backing up different files daily. 

Hello, 

 Technically it is the blocks that are changed, not the files.  The SAN does not see "files".  So the sum of the changes made between snapshots are what are captured.  So yes changes to the page file would be included in the snapshot. 

 However, are you paging that much?  If so maybe allocate more memory to that VM? 

 Also VMware creates a "pagefile" of its own.  That swapfile can be moved to a volume where snapshots are not taken.  That helps reduce the snapshot size as well. 

 Regards,

Don 

Are you talking about two different types of backups? Via VMware and directly on SAN?

We did use VRanger to back up one of our servers but that would fail to clean the VMWare snapshot which would lead to snapshot increase to the point it filled up the whole drive and killed the server due to lack of space.

When taking a backup with VSM is it the same process as using vRanger - is a normal VMWare snapshot taken and then copied over to the snapshot volume of the SAN?

He was talking about using snapshots on the Dell PS Series SAN.   VSM, VMware Storage Manager is software that works with vCenter and PS SAN to create more consistent snapshots or replication. 

Don