VDR Appliance has extra Hard Disks

[rogressem]

I have a VM that VDR gets stuck on (Snaphot completes but gets stuck after about 25% copy) and stays as a stuck task until I reboot the VDR.

I noticed that 3 extra Hard Disks are monted to my VDR appliance (machinename_000007.vmdk, machinename_000005.vmdk and machinename 00003.vmdk).

1. Can I just disconnect these from the VDR appliance?

2. I don't think are disk associated with the actual VM, can I delete them?

[fgl · Accepted solution]

rogressem,

After you reboot the VDR appliance it should automatically delete the snapshot of the VM and also clean up those disk attached to the VDR. If it didn't do that can you verify if maybe you removed the stuck VM from the backup job selection as I have found over the numerious times I've encounter stuck VMs that if I remove the VM from backup selection then after the reboot the VDR does not clean itself up. Try adding the VM to a backup job and reboot the VDR again.

I am now 90% sure that what is causing VMs to be stuck at different percentages is a corruption in a previous backup. The integrity job will not or is unable to detect this corruption because the integrity job will also run clean and shows no errors at all. What I have been doing is on the stuck VM I delete the last few restore points (3-5) then reboot the VDR which usually kicks off a recatalog when it comes back up and the stuck VM will again do backups like normal without being stuck. I have been using this method for the last 4 stuck VMs and it works for me at least.

good luck.

[rogressem]

Thanks - I think you hit the nail on the head. That was it. I'll add your tips to my list of ways to properly kick-start VDR and clear out "stuff". (another important one that I learned here, always reboot the appliance AFTER rebooting vCenter.

[fgl]

(another important one that I learned here, always reboot the appliance AFTER rebooting vCenter.

Yes this is very true and in another post I also brought this up. Make sure you have no backups or task running in VDR when you reboot the vCenter otherwise your running backups and task will get fubar and the aftermath clean is a mess, believe me I've gone through the pain. I always shutdown my VDR appliance before I reboot my vCenter server from now on.