Snapshot removal

[Fizzmo]

Hi,

This morning i notice a LUN was down to 212mb. This was 250GB in size with 2 VMs 100 & 104GB each. An adminstrator took a snapshot and forgot about it. This grew to 45GB. When reminded he went ahead and removed / deleted the snapshot, all was going well unti lat 95% an Error:

"msg.hbacommon.outofspace. no more space for virtual disk App1-000002.vmdk"

From my research this vmdk file would be the Consolidate Helper file that is the temp working area whilst core VMDK and snapshot are merged. So my question is:

For snapshots do I need to make sure I have the same amount of space as the snapshot I am deleting?

[arturka · Accepted solution]

Hi

it depends what version of ESX you have and if you have one snapshot or more, see the article below

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/07/05/changes-to-snapshot-mechanism-delete-all/

are you going to delete snapshot on live systems ? if yes for sure you need more that 212 MB. Depends on storage performance 45GB snapshot might take a while (around 2 hours) to delete. I would suggest you power down VM and remove snapshot (when you put down VM you will get free space equals to VM RAM) or do VMFS extend and delete a snapshot.

Cheers
Artur

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