Parent VM Recovery - Instant Clone Question and Issue

[BarryUWSEFS]

I just upgraded to 7.13 from 7.11  in order to convert to Instant Clone pools and then complete the upgrade to 2006. I am simply installing the 7.13 agent on the parent image and then creating the IC pools, then deleting the LC pools, as per VMware's guide. . Everything was going well until the last pool. After creating the IC pool, I deleted the LC pool, and the parent image disappeared. I went back and looked at all the tasks and could see all the deletions of the vm's from the pool, and the folder they were in, but there is not a task reporting the deletion of the parent. Very strange. I also notice on the cluster that this pool is on there are no cp-parents. Is that because the parent image is gone?

Anyway, the folder for the parent image was still in the data store with three vmdk files. So I recovered by creating a new VM and adding the vmdk for the hard disk. So basically, I guess have my parent VM back, although I notice not all the customization are recovered.

Question - I noticed that the cp-replicas and cp-template all have full clone options, clone to VM and clone to template. Would this also be a way to create a parent image if you did a clone to vm? Or clone to template and the template to vm?

Thanks!

[BarryUWSEFS]

And I just noticed that provisioning is failing for this pool. I didn't think the provisioning depended on the parent image until you pushed it out again.

[sjesse]

Do you have any appstacks that require the exact same parent image, or do you have applications on the parent image, if not I'd just redo it,

[BarryUWSEFS]

Hi, no appstacks, but yeah, applications. I restored the vmdk to a new VM, but it did not pick up the snapshots, don't think there is a way to do that. So I just need to make the changes and updates from the two snapshots and I should be good to go. Then I am going to make a backup! Thank you.

[sjesse]

Snapshots are kinda vmdks that point to other ones and there is a parent id, so unless you restore the original one the snapshots won't come back.

[BarryUWSEFS]

Well I had  the primary vmdk and two from snapshots. I followed this KB to recover the VM by creating a new VM and adding the exisitng vmdk as hard drive. But that did not recover it with the snapshots. So I just updated it. Then I cloned it to get all the vmdk and files together in one folder. Now it is my new parent and its workig fine. Not sure if there is a better way in this situation.