opvizor Free Snapwatcher Detects Broken Snapshots in VMWare

opvizor GmbH launched Snapwatcher to discover any hidden, invalid or broken snapshots in VMware in order to free up more disk space.

“81% of all vSphere environments are affected by invalid snapshots that are notoriously hard to detect. Because each Snapshot’s Delta-file can grow to be the same size as their original files, you can easily develop space shortages in your data stores with enough broken snapshots. This is a common problem for anyone as invalid snapshots are hidden and customers keep their snapshots a lot longer than planned and perform large changes on their VMs while using snapshots.” says Dennis Zimmer, CEO and founder, opvizor.

Snapwatcher is designed to free precious disk space wasted by fixing broken, old and invalid snapshots with a click. It monitors VMware snapshots across all VMware vCenter systems and reports progress of any space it was able to save. Snapwatcher’s grid allows the user to monitor hundreds of snapshots at a time, making it  to immediately detect any bad snapshots in the virtual environment.

Snapshots are a popular virtualization function, and make it possible for VM administrators to revert to previous stages when something goes wrong in the virtual environment. However, snapshots must be consistently monitored by age, size and growth rates to prevent invalid snapshots from hogging disk space. Invalid snapshots are caused by many kinds of actions the system admin has no control of, such as backup solutions which trigger snapshot creation and deletion. If the VMware struggles to delete the snapshot files, an invalid snapshot is created. Until now, these kinds of snapshots have been hard to detect, and would typically continue to grow and waste large volumes of disk space if left ignored.

“Because we were regularly detecting hundreds of TBs of invalid snapshots for our customers at opvizor, we decided to create Snapwatcher to help our customers manage and additionally delete snapshots on a daily basis before their problems get out of hand. We hope Snapwatcher can help anyone find and remove even the meanest of hidden, invalid or broken snapshots,” states Zimmer.

Snapwatcher is being released during beta as free to the public, and can be downloaded.