Friday, 10 April 2015

VMware vSphere 6 Client - Storage Views Tab Missing

I updated our VMware ESXi 5.1 and vCenter 5.1 environment to version 6 this week (more on that later).  After this, I couldn't find the Storage Views tab, which is a plugin that I use regularly to ensure that we don't have any snapshots that have been forgotten about.  I've nearly put myself in trouble in the past by forgetting about a snapshot that I've taken and nearly not had the space to merge the snapshot back.

After some investigation (and finding nothing) I got in touch with VMware support who were great as always.  It seems that the Storage Views tab has been discontinued from vSphere 6.0 but they didn't update the release notes and documentation to tell people about it.

Thankfully, there's an easy way to sort it out.

Short Version
Create an alarm to let you know when a snapshot grows to a specified size.

Long Version

  1. Select the required level in your vCenter environment (e.g. Datacentre level) and select the Alarms tab.
  2. Select the Definitions view and right-click in the white space to create a new alarm
  3. Give the alarm a name, tell it to monitor Virtual Machines and to look for specific conditions.
  4. Right-click in Triggers, select New Trigger and change the type to VM Snapshot Size.
  5. Set the condition to 'is above' and decide what Gb value you want to be warned at and then alerted at.  Nothing is required in the Condition Length fields

vSphere Client Alert Settings

Bear in mind that different VMs will have different base snapshot sizes due to different RAM amounts, so you might need to play around with your values.  You could also create a more specific set of alarms, targeted at different machines.

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