Description of problem: The new backup api feature, which allows ISV to backup virtual machines (with their disks), uses the snapshots of the VMs as backup points. The operation of the ISV is to create snapshots on a preconfigured points in time and backup the snapshots disks and OVFs to an external storage. Since RHEV does not have the ability to perform live snapshot merge, when we are talking about a normal customer environment, with ~100 VMs, the existing of a large amount of snapshot can be very dangerous to the system. On a scenario of a customer that has ~100 VMs and uses a backup software, which will create snapshots to those VMs every day, we can get to a situation of a very large number of volumes which will create and won't be deleted (because we cannot delete snaphsots while VM is running). For example: Lets say that a customer has 100 VMs Each VM has ~2 disks Backup software is configured to take snapshot every day: After 1 month we will have 100*2*30 = 6000 volumes. In case RAM memory is also taken as part of the snapshot, it will triple the number of the volumes. Even if customer will shutdown the VMs in order to merge the snapshot, the merge itself will take a relatively long period and will break his continuously operating.
What is actually needed here is live snapshot merge capabilities, which is actually an existing RFE, Hence closing duplicate. Also note that in some cases bz1032679[RFE] implementation should also help this eliviate the problem. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 647386 ***