International Business Machines Corporation
Space management for snapshots of execution images

Abstract:

An approach is provided for storing a snapshot of an execution image of a virtual machine (VM) instance. Based on VM, application, criticality, and change parameters, and based on a recommendation model trained on historical data about effects that changes caused by VM execution had on a capacity of a storage system that stores execution images of VM instances in first datastores, a tier is selected from multiple tiers of the storage system as the tier recommended for storing the snapshot. A datastore is selected for storing the snapshot so that the selected datastore is associated with the selected tier and selected from second datastores dedicated to storing only snapshots. The snapshot is created in the selected datastore and in the selected tier and unused space in a portion of the storage system for storing the first datastores is reduced.