There’s more to backing up and managing virtual machines than meets the eye.

Those who followed my previous posts know that I am using a storage server called FreeNAS in a VMware virtualization environment. There are several benefits of why one would use a storage server rather than just a trivial storage solution. Two of such major benefits are snapshots and replication. In this article I will discuss the challenges of doing ZFS snapshots on a FreeNAS server, which is used for storing VMware VMs, how the existing FreeNAS-VMware integration is implemented, what the limitations of the current implementation are and will propose changes to improve the integration. By following through you will be able to understand the challenges, the existing setup and whether you are affected. If you are affected you could install a patch to resolve any issues until the fixes are incorporated in the official source code. Basics A snapshot is a read-only copy of a storage volume at the time the snapshot was generated. Though it acts as a copy of the volume, effectively the snapshot shares data with the…