Chapter 15. Snapshot Handling

Data is written to storage devices frequently in such a dynamic environment as vSphere 5. Losing a few hours’ worth of data, for whatever reason, could translate to a large amount of data loss. Storage arrays provide varying forms of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) capability to help mitigate this risk. Examples of these capabilities are

• Snapshots

• Replicas

• Mirrors

In this chapter, I cover details affecting VMFS (virtual machine file system) datastores.

What Is a Snapshot?

A storage snapshot is a static view of data at a certain point in time. It is commonly implemented as pointers to unmodified blocks on the primary LUN as of the time of taking the snapshot. If and when any of the blocks are to ...

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