Can i delete vmware snapshots

I've never encountered that issue so I don't know for sure, but the implication is that you need to follow this:. They are doing this because of the snapshots. And yeah delete them if you don't need them. Snapshots should rarely be taken on a production server. It screws your datastore by using the resources. Delete the snapshot if you want your machine to stay at its current state.

Go To a snapshot if you want to "undo" your changes. What you are basically doing with the snapshot is making a copy of the drive. That copy then is becoming the current drive and the old snapshot you had would be saved. So you basically have two drives at this point on the datastore.

When you consolidate them it is going to merge all of them together and will take a fair amount of time depending on the size of the drive. This also depends on the amount that the data actually changed too. Justin is right on with the deleting. If you delete the snapshots you will go back to the original and lose all of that data changes from time x to time y. You want to consolidate or you will lose data. Deleting the snapshot gets rid of the logical point in time state, so you won't be able to go back.

That's what you need to do. And if you have to wait until after hours, then your SAN wasn't sized correctly. What does it all mean? One of life's great questions I emailed several of my colleagues about this a while back, and I think most of the information still applies:. VMware is a very powerful virtualization product, with many features that aren't available in a traditional server implementation. One advantageous feature is the use of snapshots. Before making a big change to a virtual machine, you can take a snapshot.

Then, if something goes terribly wrong, all you have to do is revert the snapshot to restore the VM to its original state. However, there are a few items to note regarding the use of snapshots: - Snapshots aren't intended to be kept long-term. Take a snapshot before making a change; if the change works, remove the snapshot and commit any changes to the original parent disk. If the child disks grow too large, it's only a matter of time before their associated VMs run into serious issues.

This illustrates the previous point of not keeping snapshots long-term. Given this fact, if you plan to clone a VM for troubleshooting, make sure it doesn't have any snapshots before you clone it.

After you understand snapshots a bit more, the following articles may prove useful. Sorry I must be having a Monday moment. You can delete those based on the "you are here" It will only delete old values that aren't being used anyway Your teacher was right, because "delete" doesn't simply delete a snapshot.

If you simply deleted the snapshot and associated files , you'd have to revert back or "Go To" the previous point in the snapshot chain. After all of the changes are committed, it deletes the snapshot files. If your VM is "sitting" at the last snapshot in the chain, you should be able to do a "Delete All" and commit the changes in the snapshot to the parent disk.

When navigating in the Snapshot Manager, just replace the word Delete with the word Commit and that should clear up most of the confusion. As far as consolidation goes, that is the general terminology VMware uses to describe how snapshots are merged and removed.

This solution was sized properly. We measured IOs and a lot of other metrics and then used that data to size the hardware. I am going to do it and see if works. Right now the SAN is cruising. It actually does more work during the backup cycles than during the day anyway.

Thanks all for the wonderful and timely help. I just made that volume another Gigs larger. That server just breathed a big sigh of relief and bought me some time do do more cleaning. Yeah, a lot of people get confused by this. I always have to double-check myself. They should have something that says "revert changes" and "keep changes". If you try remove a snapshot manually single, all, children etc keeps failing.

I have tried through powercli also and same see error below. We have had to stop backups as our data store is about to run out of space. When the details are available it is so much easier We just needed less than an hour via Teamviewer to fix the problem. View solution in original post.

Then try consolidation operation again while you directly connected to the ESXi host not via the Center server or executing Power-CLI then give back the result of this, please.

If Veeam is a VM within vSphere environment, go to edit settings of it and ensure it does not have the disk of the problematic VM attached to it. If yes, detach it.

Discussing snapshots problem without details is a bit risky. Send all descriptor-vmdks, the vmsd and latest 2 vmware. When you use automatic backup-tools you MUST also use daily monitoring because if you run out of space with a sesparse snapshot it probably gets corrupted. Appreciate the feedback. Please see attached latest log and vsrm file as only allows me to upload the ZIP.

The screen shot below you can see in the data store we actually have about 24 snapshots attached. Because of the bad vmsd you also cant use the Consolidation function. Suggested fix : created empty sub-directory "deleteme-later" and move the vmsd-file into it. So from understanding below, if just create a blank folder in the DS and move the vmdd file into it, that should allow me to consolidate or delete the snap shots?

Guessing the VM would have to be shutdown or restarted after moving the file to rebuild a new one? If winscp does not allow to move the vmsd - rename it to invalid. Ok thank you. Have renamed and can see its cleared the previous snapshot names.

Then can go back and manually delete all those old ones? Tried pressing consolidate but nothing happens and the 26 existing snapshots are still there. Did you already check whether one of the VM's.

I've seen issues like this a few times when backup jobs failed unexpectedly, and the backup server was not able to do the cleanup unmont the virtual disk. So instead create a new snapshot and then use the delete-all function. Anyone able to give me some help? The DC wont turn on now. Anyone on Skype even able to assist???

Please do not create duplicate threads for the same issue - the second thread you created has been archived. Sorry - last night I was too tired to help via skype Please try to provide more details - we dont know anything about your DC - is that the same VM that we discussed already?