An administrator receives an escalation to investigate a low disk space alarm on a datastore.
The administrator discovers that a snapshot has been accidentally taken on a production, write-intensive database server.
The snapshot has grown to nearly 1 TB in size in less than an hour and continues growing every second.
Which behavior should the administrator expect while deleting the snapshot? (Choose the best answer.)
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.B.
When a snapshot is created on a virtual machine, any changes to the virtual disks are written to a delta disk, which is a file that grows in size as changes are made to the virtual machine's disks. This delta disk allows the virtual machine to be reverted to a previous state, while the original disks remain unchanged.
In the scenario described, the administrator has discovered that a snapshot has been accidentally taken on a production, write-intensive database server. The snapshot has grown to nearly 1 TB in size in less than an hour and continues growing every second. This means that the delta disk associated with the snapshot is rapidly increasing in size, which could lead to issues with disk space and performance.
To address this issue, the administrator needs to delete the snapshot. When a snapshot is deleted, the changes stored in the delta disk are merged with the original disks, effectively consolidating the virtual disks to their original state.
Regarding the behavior that the administrator should expect while deleting the snapshot, Option A is incorrect because ESXi does not create a virtual RAM disk to cache ongoing database write activity. Option B is a possibility because ESXi will commit the snapshot delta disk into the base disk, but ongoing database write activity could result in long stun times, which is a period of time when the virtual machine is unresponsive. Option D is incorrect because ESXi does not instantly switch from the base disk to the snapshot delta disk with no performance impact.
Therefore, the correct answer is Option C, which states that ESXi will merge the snapshot delta disk into the base disk, and the virtual machine will be briefly stunned. This means that there will be a period of time when the virtual machine will be unresponsive while the snapshot delta disk is being merged with the base disk. The duration of the stun time will depend on the size of the delta disk and the speed of the storage. However, once the merge is complete, the virtual machine will return to its normal state.