Removing hidden snapshots

[kmebel]

Has anyone experienced the following issue with snapshots and if so do you have a recommendation for a solution?

We have a VM with snapshots that do not show up in Snapshot Manager. It is running on a 4.1 host with the vmdk files stored on local disk with 1MB block size. We need to migrate the VM off local storage to a SAN but we can't because of the "hidden" snapshots and trying to create a new snapshot fails because of the vmdk size limitation with 1MB block size. Error: “Creating a snapshot for a virtual machine fails with the error: File is larger than maximum file size supported”

We are running Essentials Plus with 3 hosts on 4.1. One host is basically test and dev so we can do whatever we want with it. The only possible workaround I've seen thus far is to cold clone the VM to a new datastore or try to migrate it to a host on 3.5 or earlier. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

Can you use VMware Converter (which will consolidate the snapshots) to move the guest, or cold migration (which will retain)

[kmebel]

We shut down the VM and did a cold clone which removed all "hidden" snapshots. Everything worked to perfection.

[maneltbc]

Folow steps in this guide: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2030681

[lvaibhavt]

Hi Kmebel,

Need to ask you something ... When you say that the snapshots were not visible in Snapshot Manager then were the delta files visible from Putty session?

Thanks

[kmebel]

I didn't view them through Putty but I did see the snapshot deltas by browsing the datastore.