VMs with consolidation needed status View

[lucasbernadsky]

Hi community. I'm trying to get a list of all the VMs that need to be consolidated, but couldn't find any property or super metric that allowed me to do that. Any ideas?

[KabirAli82]

Yeah tried it myself... no luck... I ended up using vRLI.

[lucasbernadsky]

Hi kabir. I thing we are at the same spot. The thing about vRLI is that it only tells you when a new VM needs consolidation, but not when the VM is consolidated. So if, for example, your backup tool is still working with the VM you may get some false positives, right?

[KabirAli82]

Hi Luca. My customer just wanted an alert, so that was easy to do with vRLI.

The consolidation message in vCenter only appears when the snapshot mechanism fails to write data back to its base disk. Or when a delete a snapshot (delta) disk fails. It should not be triggered when you backup software is creating a backup. That is just a normal snapshot. What I have seen is that if the backup software fails to remove its (temporary) snapshots, you could get a consolidation message. Then I'm talking about +20 snapshots.