Support Tips: Scale HC3 Snapshot Scheduling and Rules
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There are a few considerations to keep in mind when implementing a snapshot schedule for a VM. You will want to keep the overall available capacity on the cluster in mind when determining how many snapshots to retain. With the recurrences of the snapshot schedule in mind; one schedule can hold multiple recurrences from minutely to monthly configurations. As a best practice, separate different recurrences that may clash in different schedules.The shortest interval a snapshot recurrence that you should use is 5 minutes, anything less and it could cause unexpected behavior in the snapshot scheduling functionality. A VM can only have one snapshot schedule assigned to it at a time. You may have to create customized schedules for specific VMs depending on your backup needs.
The default snapshot schedule on 7.x is 15 minutes with a retention of 1 snapshot.This is designed to provide the lowest storage cost while still maintaining near real-time DR capabilities. It is important to evaluate multiple factors when determining your snapshot schedules such as Storage availability (source and target cluster), your current DR requirements, and network bandwidth limitations (when utilizing replication). It is also important to remember that different snapshot schedules may benefit VMs with different DR requirements.
