Can't consolidate in any way

[PatricNIX]

Hi!

I have 8 VMs on a vSphere 6 host that has a couple delta files laying around and I can't delete them.

I think it's because I used Acronis backup for VMware and it failed constantly, creating delta files and not deleting them.

Now we are moving to Veeam Backup & Replication and I can't do backups on the 8 VMs on this specific host that Acronis fucked up.

In the web client the "Consolidate" is greyed out. I can click on it if I use the old VMware vSphere Client for desktop but nothing happens. It just says "Completed" after a few seconds.

If I run 'vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.removeall [VMID]' I just get "Remove All Snapshots:" and nothing else.

If I try to create a snapshot I just get this:

Create Snapshot:

Create snapshot failed

How do I get rid of these? I really need to make backups as soon as I can and this is not helping me at all.

What's then next step?

[a_p_]

To find out what may cause the issue, let's take a detailed look at one of the VMs.

• does the Acronis Server or any of its proxies still have one or more of the VM's virtual disks/snapshots attached (hot-add)?
• provide a complete list of files in the VM's folder, i.e. the output of the ls -lisa command
• attach the VM's .vmx, .vmsd as well as the latest vmware.log to a reply post

André

[PatricNIX]

• I'm not sure. It's possible. The Acronis server crashed and I couldn't get it up again. That's one of the reasons we are moving to Veeam.
• Attached the output of ls -lisa
• vmware.log was around 500MB so I just took the last 200 lines, hope that's enough.

[hussainbte]

Go to machine summary and check the provisioned space for the VM.

This will sum up all the space used by the VM including snapshot, memory swap etc.

If you have a datastore with same or more free space, initiate a clone of the machine.

The cloned machine will have all snapshots consolidated.

but if the machine is big and as I can see there are lot of snapshot delta files in use this can take time.. lot of time

you just have to be patient and make sure there is enough space.

with the machine running on so many snapshot I am assuming there is already a performance hit.

Once the clone completes, power off the old server and power on the clone machine(to avoid IP conflict)

make sure the clone is OK and delete the old server to get your space back

[PatricNIX]

Thanks for the answer. I will try this. However as of right now I don't have enough disk space so I will have to get more disks installed and that could take a couple of days..

[PatricNIX · Accepted solution]

I found a solution for this.

I had an iso-file specified in all of the VMs CD-ROM although it wasn't connected. The iso-file was on a NFS-share that was disconnected.

For some reason I couldn't get it to connect again and I couldn't remove it either as the VMs was using it.

On some VMs I could use the vSphere desktop client to remove it but most VMs showed the CD-ROM as "restricted" and I couldn't change any settings.

I couldn't make any changes in the Web Client as the disks where all messed up with the snapshots so I couldn't save.

Then I figured I could use "Install Vmware Tools" to make it mount that iso-file instead (Interactive Tools Upgrade). When I had done that I could create a snapshot successfully and open the snapshot manager and "Delete All".

I had to end the Vmware Tools installation after the snapshots where deleted for the next VM to be able to make a successful snapshot for some reason.

I have 4 more VMs to go but so far it's working.

Hopefully someone else will find this post helpful.