ESXi

I have a VM running on an ESXi 5.5 that had one disk pointing to a snapshot file after running a 'Delete All' command to consolidate all the snapshots. All the other disks on the VM consolidated fine. The VM was then showing a 'Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed.' message. I checked the VMX file for the VM and the one 3.5TB disk was pointing to a '-000002-sesparse.vmdk' disk.

I checked the VMware support pages and found:

Determining if there are leftover delta files or snapshots that VMware vSphere or Infrastructure Client cannot detect (1005049)

Reading through that and running the commands showed there was a 'sesparse.vmdk' file in the deltadisks folder. The guide then pointed to:

Committing snapshots when there are no snapshot entries in the Snapshot Manager (1002310)

At first I ran the suggested command line fixes, but when I ran the 'snapshot.get' command it did not list any snapshots like what was listed in the guide. So I stopped using the command line and tried the first suggestion to create a new snapshot and then run 'Delete All' again.

The 'Take Snapshot...' command started and then hung at 95% for a while then gave the following failure notice:

'The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing. The error code was: 5 The error message was: 'VssSyncStart' operation failed: IDispatch error #8449 (0x80042301)'

Now all the disks have snapshot delta files and the initial disk with the problem has a new delta disk starting with '-000001' (Down from -000002).

Here is the folder structure for the VM (the trouble disk is on a separate LUN and all other disks are stored with the VM):

Root VM Folder

BAKEDBEAN.nvram

BAKEDBEAN.vmsd

BAKEDBEAN.vmx

BAKEDBEAN.vmx.lck

BAKEDBEAN.vmx~

BAKEDBEAN.vmxf

BAKEDBEAN_4.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_4-000001.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_4-000001-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_4-000001-delta.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_4-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_4-flat.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5-000001.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5-000001-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5-000001-delta.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_5-flat.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6-000001.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6-000001-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6-000001-delta.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_6-flat.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7-000001.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7-000001-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7-000001-delta.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN_7-flat.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-aux.xml

BAKEDBEAN-ca8e35fd.hlog

BAKEDBEAN-ca8e35fd.vswp

vmware.log

vmware-16.log

vmware-17.log

vmware-18.log

vmware-19.log

vmware-20.log

vmware-21.log

vmx-BAKEDBEAN-3398317565-1.vswp

Separate LUN for this disk (3.5TB thick provisioned disk / 4TB total LUN size)

BAKEDBEAN.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000001.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000001-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000001-sesparse.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000002.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000002-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-000002-sesparse.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-ctk.vmdk

BAKEDBEAN-flat.vmdk

One other note to add is that I am using Veeam for backup, so CBT is turned on. I know this has caused problems on this same VM before when we migrated it to a new vCenter and at one point had to edit the VMX to turn off the CBT setting.

Any tips on what I can do to consolidate this VM?

Thank you,

Brent

Shutdown the VM and try to consolidate.

less BAKEDBEAN.vmx | grep vmdk

Check the disk consistency/Chain with below command

vmkfstools -e -v10 BAKEDBEAN-000002.vmdk

Note :- Once the VM is down and consolidated started  wait until it completes. Do not power on VM or cancel the task. 

ArjunDooti,

After shutting down the VM, the snapshot manager the VM still showed no snapshots to consolidate, so I ran another snapshot while the VM was off. This last snapshot showed up in the manager, so then I consolidated the snapshot and all the vmdks are back to normal. No more orphaned deltas.

Thank you,

Brent