Good morning.  The snapshot gets backup copied off to protective storage as part of the Intellisnap operation.  Can you please provide me the reason for wanting to keep the snapshots in VMware?

What’s the use case for keeping the snapshots? The next backup could potentially have an issue if snapshots exist for the machine. 

Hello guys,

Sorry for my late reply, I was on holiday last week.

Actually, I can’t answer your questions. The Customer asked me if there is any way to keep snapshots after backup’s completed. I didn’t asked them for the reason.

I also told them that keeping snapshot may cause na issue during next backup but they still pushed me to find the way to keep them, so I pomised the Customer that I'll ask you guys.

As I can see, there is no way to keep snapshots (but Intellisnap feature) and it’s even not recommended, so I think that we can just close this topic.

Many thanks for your help guys.

Rgds,

Kamil

I have no idea if this will work, but theoretically IntelliSnap for VSAN would allow you to do this. I don't know if it will detect that its not VSAN datastore and disallow it - but you can try...

The idea is, IntelliSnap snap backups will simply create a snapshot on the VM. A backup copy operation will transfer the point in time snapshot of the VM to storage. You can adjust retention separately to allow the snapshot to be left behind for longer - however VMware would never recommend to do this on a traditional VMFS or NFS datastore. 

Enabling VVol and VSAN Support

To enable VVol and VSAN support for a subclient, perform the following steps:

1. From the CommCell Browser, navigate to Client Computers> virtualization_client > VMware > backup_set.

2. Right-click the subclient and select Properties.

3. In the Subclient Properties dialog box, click the IntelliSnap Operations tab.

4. Select the IntelliSnap option.

5. From the Available Snap Engines list, select Virtual Server Agent Snap.

6. Click OK.