Snapshots present, but not removable

[EPL]

I recently set up an alarm on my cluster to show any Guest's with a Snapshot > 1GB. I have an interesting situation where some of my Guest's are reporting alarms for said Snapshot alert, however if I click on the SnapShot manager icon it does not list any snapshots. If I go to the VM hosting the guest and take a look at the directory listing, I see -000001-delta.vmdk, and the -flat.vmdk hasn't been written to in about 10 days.

So, I ran vmware-cmd {path to vm} removesnapshots, I get a result of: removesnapshots()=1, I do another ls, yet the delta is still there, and the alert still shows. I'm getting this on about 6 of my Guests.

Has anyone else ran into this issue?

[java_cat33]

Nope I haven't seen it on ESX4 - however create a new snapshot on one of your guests and select "delete all" - see if this deletes both of the snaps.

[depping · Accepted solution]

Are you running Data Recovery by any chance?

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/29/snapshot-issue-with-vmware-data-recovery/

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[EPL]

Duncan,

I think you hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what my issue is. I will try this on a vm and post results.

Thanks!

[EPL]

Yep... that was it exactly. The Data Recovery left all sorts of ddb.deletable = "False" on the vmdk's.

The real problem is that you don't know you're running on the snapshots unless you either grep for "ddb.deletable = "false" " on all your vmdk's. Or do what I did, which was set up a VCenter Alarm that triggers if a snapshot is > 1GB. I also find it odd that the vCenter Alarm found the problem, but the rest of vCenter or any of the other tools show that the vm has no snapshots.

Thank you for your help!