IF I have a Virtual Machine with serveral snapshots, what is the easiest way to perserve all data and consolidate into a single monolithic vm.
thanks,
Either power off the VM and use right click -> clone in the VI client, or add another snapshot to the VM and then on the level below the snapshot you just added run vmkfstools -i agains the snapshot descriptor file (.vmdk, not -delta.vmdk).
e.g. If you had a VM with 2 snaps currently, and added a third snap layer.
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/yourvol/yourvm/yourvm-000002.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/yourvol/yourclonevm/yourclonevm.vmdk[/code]
This will consolodate all snaps into yourclone.vmdk, you can then create a new VM and point it at this disk and you're away. Once you've clone the VM you can remove the third layer of snap from the original VM.
Either power off the VM and use right click -> clone in the VI client, or add another snapshot to the VM and then on the level below the snapshot you just added run vmkfstools -i agains the snapshot descriptor file (.vmdk, not -delta.vmdk).
e.g. If you had a VM with 2 snaps currently, and added a third snap layer.
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/yourvol/yourvm/yourvm-000002.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/yourvol/yourclonevm/yourclonevm.vmdk[/code]
This will consolodate all snaps into yourclone.vmdk, you can then create a new VM and point it at this disk and you're away. Once you've clone the VM you can remove the third layer of snap from the original VM.