As commented earlier, I’ve had some problem running SnapManager on our Virtual Infrastructure and NetApp Filers. SnapMananager insists on snapshotting all VM on a datastore at the same time, which leads to timeout problems in the VSS system.

As an alternative I’ve been exploring NetApp’s VIBE (Virtual Infrastructure Backup Engine) script, and it actually seems to be doing the job just right!

VIBE makes VMware snapshots of all the VM’s on the datastore, just like SnapManager, but it does so one VM at the time – it take quite a bit longer to generate (and remove) all the snapshots, but gone are all the timeout problems.