We have veeam for backup software for backing up VM's. We are working with veeam support on a separate issue and they told us to look for orphaned snapshots. We didn't have any but we had a few orphaned disks in our environment from people remove a disk but not deleting it. So I checked the orphaned disk against the virtual machines configuration and it clearly was not a disk that was mounted to the virtual machine. So I moved it out of the folder for the virtual machine into another folder on the vmfs volume just in case. I didn't have an issue moving the disk. The virtual machine did have a veeam snapshot on it at the time I moved the disk. When the backup completed the snapshot committed. There were a few errors in the vpxa log about could not find the file (the vmdk that I moved) right after having moved it but nothing else. Soon after it was reported to me that a disk in the Windows machine was offline. They brought the disk back online and decided to initialize it so needless to say they are restoring data from backup. What I'm having a hard time getting is how moving an orphaned disk brought an unassociated disk offline. I'm 100% certain this disk was not part of the virtual machine as I compared it to the virtual machines configuration. I also looked at vROps to see what disks were present before and after and no disk disappeared from the machine. The event logs on the machine also don't indicate a disk was pulled from it. Could the snapshot being on the machine at the time I moved the disk have impacted the machine in some way where it would make a disk go offline and lose data because I moved this disk?
