Vmware server remove snapshot files

In the case of NetApp yeah, I worked there too , it is near instantaneous. Taking a snapshot is quite easy in VMware. First, right click the VM you would like to Snapshot, and select Snapshot from the menu, you will see several options:. Next you will have the ability to name your snapshot and give it a description. Make sure to put something that makes sense here, so you know the purpose of the snapshot.

Great question! After you have taken your snapshot, you can then use VMware snapshot manager. From VMware Snapshot Manager, you have th ability to see more information on each of your snapshots, and manage them. Yes, you can even have multiple snapshots!

A snapshot of a snapshot. It is a bit like inception. Snapshot manager is nice because it gives you more information about the snapshot or snapshots, such as name, date, notes, and the size of the snapshot.

The snapshot operations are:. By deleting a VMware snapshot , you are doing just that, deleting it. This is a bit of a simplification of the process. As I mentioned before, this process is resource intensive and may cause performance degradation.

VMware recommends not leaving a snapshot open for more than 72 hours, and depending on your application that could even be quite a bit of data to consolidate. In the case of reverting to a VMware snapshot, we are going back to the original VM state. This means we are basically throwing away the changes from when you took the snapshot. There is not the performance penalty you would see with a snapshot delete or consolidating the snapshots in this case.

The trick is to think of things in terms of the point in time copy of your VM , not the changes that have been made to your VM after the snapshot was taken. Deleting a VMware snapshot deletes the point in time copy of your VM. All changes that you have made to your VM since the snapshot was taken stay with your VM. No backups are currently running. On-hold until I deal with this. Only one VM has a snapshot. If VM is running, and you remove the snapshot, there's still some temporary VMDK, that keeps all the changes while VM running, consuming more disk space, that you don't have more.

I don't think, that deleting some files from VM will help, it could become worse, because it'll see, that some blocks has changed, and it will write the changes to delta file.

I would not turn off the VM but run a backup of the VM first How big is the VM and total storage size? Then just use VMware viClient based on 5. I've come across this situation before. I'd recommend you acknowledge that you are looking at downtime to do this safely. Just fyi, any changes to the VM data will likely increase the size of the snapshot file due to changes on the VM disk.

The easiest way to deal with this is probably to use VMware's vCenter converter to send the vm disk to another host and datastore you can always transfer it back after if needbe depending on your storage setup. Where you convert the vm data depends on the sizes of the disk, actual data in use, type of virtual disk thick or thin provisioned and network speed. If your actual amt of data in use is less than your next large datastore then I'd recommend doing a conversion to that datastore with thin disks.

If its larger than your next datastore free space then probably free up as much data in the vm as you can safely, convert it to a local disk and then convert it again to the next available datastore with the appropriate free space with thin provisioning and reduced disk sizes. When deleting, double or triple check the disk locations before doing so. I would always avoid using thin provisioning or especially recommending thin provisioning to people who have "out of space" issues If the actual physical storage have only limited space, then create VMs using that limited space with buffers for snapshots, backup quiescence requirements, overheads etc.

Worse I have see cases even reported here is that people are creating like 3x or 5x VMs each using GB thin provisioning while they only have GB physical storage. Then the application admins or users start uploading files to different VMs and they eventually run out of physical space but the application admins or users still see that within their respective VM OS that there is so much more free space Would you be able to share the whole infra?

Why are the data stores created as such and not one huge data store? How much free space are within the VMs? Do you have down time available etc? Each one is a different size. Are there any snapshots on the VMs? The numeric sequence of the VMDKs indicate they are almost definitely snapshot files. There are.

I told it to consolidate snapshots, it said completed it took a few seconds and the files are still there. Ah, this is a fun problem.

That being said, call VMware support and have them do this stuff, because they have much more experience with this than anyone here. Consolidating the snapshots won't necessarily delete those files if the are from manual snapshots. You would have to go to the manage snapshots and then delete the manual snapshots that are not in use.

Brand Representative for VMware. That said, trying to go through the Snapshot manager and deleting all snapshots that way will insure that you are sitting on a 'clean' vm. If the files are still there and when you open your Snapshot Manager there are not snapshots, then you should be good to go with deleting these old snapshots.