Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed

[#1]

Consolidating snapshots in vSphere 5.x

I know this is one of the new features of vSphere 5.x which helps in consolidating the unlinked/mishandled snapshots. But i am perplexed to see an error shown below related to this feature on one of our production server which really does not have any snapshots taken at all. And the strange part here is, the VM is accessible and does not give any error or problem to the user.

As per the below VMware KB link i did see everything to be matching to this VM and also able to find the Snapshot -->Consolidate option available below Snapshot Manager. But before i could go ahead and hit consolidate just wanted to check if someone has a better option to resolve this issue with respect to my description.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=20036...

Thanks in advance.

[Anthony2224]

This is a feature and as far as I know the only way to resolve the error is to consoldiate. I suggest following the documentation and consolidating before you get corruption on a snapshot which will be far harder to recover from. What do you have managing your snapshots? there must be a SAN console that manages these. I would check the frequency of your snapshots and adjust accordingly.

[jawadqazi]

Thanks for your reply Anthony!

But i have never used Snapshot manager to create any snapshots for this VM. Does consolidation still required??

[Anthony2224]

Right click your vm and go to snapshot manager, and see if it is running on a snapshot. If it is god forbid consoladate before you run into storage issues. Also, this is a process that is manual from what I understand- it sounds like someone has created a snapshot. this is perplexing - are you the only one who is the admin on vsphere?

[jawadqazi]

Well i did check the Snapshot Manager for that VM and i could see the VM name and You are here exactly below the VM name. Thats all present in Snapshot Manager. This confirms snapshots are not created using snapshot manager. However i did find multiple VMDKs in the datastore with file names ending with 000001, 000002 etc for the same VMDK. Checking with my backup admin if backup level snaphots are being managed for this VM.

[jawadqazi]

Did check with backup admin, and this VM is not being backed up. How ever i went ahead with consolidate option but its throwing error insufficient disk space on the datastore. Do i need to migrate the VM to other datastore with sufficient disk space and then start the consolidation?

[Anthony2224]

you should be able to increase your datastore's disk space, make sure you unmount it first, resize it using your admin console (whichever your using - hp, dell, etc..) then once that is finished re-mount the datastore, rescan the data store and you should be good. If you are uncomfortable with that, you can create a new datastore with larger space, migrate to it, then delete the old one and reclaim the space. There are tons of options available. I am assuming of course your using a SAN of some kind with a Manager to size, perform maintenance on said SAN.

[JeffBeaty]

Hello,

I was wondering if I need to power off the vm first to run the consolidation?

What could happen if I run this consolidation process if the VM is running?

I have 3 disks and only one seems to have a "temp" snapshot.  This happened, when I was running a backup task from Veeam and I had to manually stopped the process.

Thanks