Hyper-V Snaps? Jeez H C NO.

So here's something for you.
1. Don't touch Hyper-V
2. See rule 1.
If you have to touch Hyper-V don't ever take snapshots using the inbuilt tools. I was recently undertaking a load of work on my simulator (7.3.2) pair (two clusters) at home. Lots of SDW6.2, SME6, SnapMirrors and SnapVaults. Why? Cos our customers want to do some seriously wacky things sometimes and it's good for me to be able to explain what works and why. So I decided to take a few snaps of the Ubuntu guests on which the sims run.

Ubuntu on Hyper-V? Shiny, The NetApp sim inside that lot? Uber-shiny.

My big problem is with Microsoft and their horrific approach to snapshots. Apart from the "don't rely on snapshots as a backup mechanism" (Ben Armstrong) BS the whole creation of massive files was unbelievable. It's an utterly ridiculous approach to snaps.

No wonder Microsoft are muting their utter loathing and hatred for NetApp in favour of an all out love-phest for SnapManager for Hyper-V.

The moral of the story is that if your VHDs reside on DAS you're a fool. Put them on the NetApp. Don't have one? Get NetApp or use VMware. Then you can put behind you the disgrace that is Hyper-V snaps and use NetApp snaps for both for the guest base system and also the guest apps.

If you do take Hyper-V snaps, expect huge outages as you need to save, merge and restart the system. If you do a shutdown of the guest be prepared for an extended outage as the snaps are merged. If you do allocate space to the system make sure you allocate enormous amounts of space so that you can play the snaps into the base file.

or get NetApp. Seriously. Get some. Our mortgage needs it.